Corporate - Startup Partnering : Exploring Attention Dynamics in Asymmetric Settings

Startups that partner concurrently with a large corporation must compete for the latter’s attention. We extend the attention-based view from an intraorganizational to an interorganizational context, exploring how startups differ in the amount of attention they receive, their actions to attract and sustain attention, and the impact of attention dynamics on the outcome of the partnership. Our research uncovers two separate contests for attention involving corporate and divisional managers, highlighting the distributed nature of attention. Reflecting these, our findings reveal how startups’ responsiveness to the respective cognitive schemas and corresponding stimuli of corporate and divisional managers is critical to understanding their distinct relational trajectories and disparate outcomes. Our focus on attention is complementary to the focus on trust that has hitherto dominated research on relational dynamics