As a result of a combination of new industrial policies and the digitalization trend, innovative startups are transforming entire industrial sectors. To maintain their competitive advantages, corporates began engaging with startups through dedicated programs as a mean to strengthen their competitive positioning. Through a multiple case study analysis focused on the Italian context, the paper identifies how engagement in a particular subset of these programs might be able to facilitate the development of different dynamic capabilities within corporations, linking the theory of dynamic capability development to the theory of startup programs.