Guido H. Baltes’s research while affiliated with HTWG Konstanz - University of Applied Sciences and other places

While Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) units have become essential tools for creating new kinds of innovation within established companies, their performance measurement remains underexplored. With CE units, companies intend to contribute to new business and organizational transformation. Thereby, CE units are used to create outputs that are new for the core organization. Until now, scholars have neglected to investigate assessing CE unit performance, leading to a lack of understanding of appropriate metrics for CE units. Companies often use traditional metrics designed for relatively static contexts, but these metrics do not fit for CE units. This study explores the metrics used in CE units, analyzing 12 interviews with 11 German companies. The analysis reveals a list of different metrics, categories, and underlying dimensions for CE unit performance measurement. Finally, we suggest scientific and managerial implications and topics for future research.

Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited time frames and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models. Software startups are quite distinct from traditional mature software companies, but also from micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, introducing new challenges relevant for software engineering research. This paper's research agenda focuses on software engineering in startups, identifying, in particular, 70+ research questions in the areas of supporting startup engineering activities, startup evolution models and patterns, ecosystems and innovation hubs, human aspects in software startups, applying startup concepts in non-startup environments, and methodologies and theories for startup research. We connect and motivate this research agenda with past studies in software startup research, while pointing out possible future directions. While all authors of this research agenda have their main background in Software Engineering or Computer Science, their interest in software startups broadens the perspective to the challenges, but also to the opportunities that emerge from multi-disciplinary research. Our audience is therefore primarily software engineering researchers, even though we aim at stimulating collaborations and research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. We believe that with this research agenda we cover a wide spectrum of the software startup industry current needs.