Challenges of Asymmetric Technological Collaboration between Large Companies and Nanotechnology Startups

Significant changes in the business environment have led many large companies to tend to asymmetric technological collaboration with startups. Despite several benefits of these collaborations for both sides, they may face many challenges in their Partnership. These challenges have rarely been uncovered in the previous studies particularly in the context of developing countries. We utilized a mixed research method to explore collaboration challenges in Iran. Firstly, we prepared a list of main collaboration challenges through investigating the literature and in depth Interviews with key informants. Secondly, we conducted a survey using a questionnaire and received 52 responds from related people to asymmetric collaboration projects. The results showed that actors involved in the collaboration process disagree on 11 challenges. We also found that contraty on the literature “misusing the large company's brand” is not a challenging issue for the collaboration in nano sector of Iran. In addition, some new challenges were identified for asymmetric collaboration that was not mentioned in literature, including; weak collaboration culture, and lack of matchmaking infrasctures.