Incubation of organisations by corporate incubators is currently regaining attention as a key way to foster innovation. However, understanding of how corporate incubators affect employee’s innovative behaviour in the host company is still limited. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the relationship between corporate incubator influence and innovative work behaviour and how this is moderated by innovation climate. Using a multi-level regression with 1,202 participants nested in 100 organisational units of a large, international company, the study shows that corporate incubators and innovation climate significantly affect innovative work behaviour. Further, we found that shared and individual perceptions of innovation climate moderate incubator influence differently. In order to improve innovative work behaviour, corporate incubators can compensate a weak innovation climate while strengthening the impact of individual perceptions of innovation climate on innovative behaviour, which introduces new ways of how companies are able to improve their innovativeness.

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Many companies have created corporate incubators to deal with the increasing pace of innovation and to foster innovation activities beyond their current business. Since these corporate incubators demand considerable resources, the parent companies continuously evaluate the incubators’ performance and then decide on their survival. This decision depends on the balance between incubator’s contributions and the hosting company’s financial investment (top-level), while the incubator’s contributions again depend on the balance between incubator investment and the supported new business contributions (bottom-level). We apply the Barnard-Simon theory of organisational equilibrium to investigate the resource flow balance on both levels and to predict the resulting incubators’ performance, which determines their future survival. The analysis is based on a sample of corporate incubators surveyed in 2019. Results show that incubators with a top-level equilibrium and a bottom-level disequilibrium perform better. These counterintuitive yet insightful results are discussed in detail.