Corporate venture capital, scouting missions, hackathons, excubators, venture clients, corporate incubators and accelerators – these are just some of the models for collaboration between large companies and startups. The practice – corporate venturing – has been adopted by firms such as Siemens, General Electric, IBM, Xerox, Merck and Lucent.

There has been significant growth in the use of these types of mechanisms. In 2010, very few of the 210 largest companies by market capitalisation worldwide used incubators and accelerators, compared…