Internal corporate venturing units face a paradoxical challenge: they must maintain entrepreneurial distinctiveness to foster innovation, yet they must also maintain corporate embeddedness within their parent firm to access essential resources and support. While prior research mainly focused on structural solutions and management-level strategies for balancing entrepreneurial distinctiveness and corporate embeddedness, we have a limited understanding of the relational dynamics shaping this balance. Further, the role of the core workforce, defined as employees without management responsibilities, has received limited attention, which is problematic because these employees (re-)shape the balance through their practices. To understand how internal corporate venturing units and their parent firms’ core workforce balance entrepreneurial distinctiveness and corporate embeddedness, we employ a multiple case study based on 53 interviews and build on the concept of boundary work. Our findings reveal that the distinctiveness-embeddedness-balance is defined by five types of boundaries—physical, symbolic, cultural, professional, and temporality—that are continuously shaped by two types of practices—rooting practices, which foster embeddedness, and blooming practices, which foster distinctiveness. We contribute to research on internal corporate venturing by uncovering the relational mechanisms through which actor-specific practices shape the distinctiveness-embeddedness-balance that remains in constant flux.
