Boundary Work in Internal Corporate Venturing to Position Optimally Distinct

Parent firms found internal corporate ventures to foster innovation. To achieve this, internal corporate ventures need to be embedded within their parent firms to benefit from their resources. At the same time, they need to be distinct enough to work entrepreneurially. Accordingly, internal corporate ventures find themselves in a paradoxical situation: They need to be distinct enough from their parent firms to stay entrepreneurially, but also need to leverage spillovers from their parent firms, such as acquiring financial resources and managerial knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to find out how internal corporate ventures balance entrepreneurial distinctiveness and corporate embeddedness while interacting with the diverse groups of actors in their parent firms.