The discovery of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the spread of COVID-19 have led many governments to take drastic measures. The lockdown of large parts of society and economic life has come as an exogenous shock to many economic actors, not least innovative startups. This rapid response research combines a qualitative research design informed by entrepreneurial ecosystem actors with an analysis of policy measures called for, announced, and reportedly implemented in the international press. Interviews from an entrepreneurial ecosystem offer a first-hand account of the adversity startups face during a crisis and how by utilizing bricolage responses they cope, and the analysis of policy measures can serve as an inspiration to design support initiatives to protect startups from the consequences of the current lockdown and to alleviate the effects of future crises. The lockdown measures as a response to the spread of the new coronavirus threaten the existence of many innovative startups. Our rapid response research first illustrates the challenges entrepreneurs face as a consequence of the crisis. Second, we illustrate how entrepreneurs are dealing with the effects of the crisis and what they are doing to protect their ventures. Finally, we present measures that could be utilized by policymakers to assist entrepreneurs facing challenges. The research conducted suggests that while startups are successfully leveraging their available resources as a first response to the crisis, their growth and innovation potential are at risk. Therefore, policy measures should not only provide first aid to startups by alleviating the pressure caused by constrained cashflow, but also involve long-term measures embedded in and supported by the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem to ensure rapid recovery and growth.
We combine theory and research on alliance networks and on new firms to investigate the impact of variation in startups’ alliance network composition on their early performance. We hypothesize that startups can enhance their early performance by 1) establishing alliances, 2) configuring them into an efficient network that provides access to diverse information and capabilities with minimum costs of redundancy, conflict, and complexity, and 3) judiciously allying with potential rivals that provide more opportunity for learning and less risk of intra-alliance rivalry. An analysis of Canadian biotech startups’ performance provides broad support for our hypotheses, especially as they relate to innovative performance. Overall, our findings show how variation in the alliance networks startups configure at the time of their founding produces significant differences in their early performance, contributing directly to an explanation of how and why firm age and size affect firm performance. We discuss some clear, but challenging, implications for managers of startups. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Purpose Startup companies represent a powerful engine of open innovation (OI) processes. The purpose of this paper is to represent a first step in building a map of the state-of-the-art knowledge of the “startups in an OI context” phenomenon. Through the selection and analysis of relevant literature, this study aims at deepening our understanding of the theme and at providing directions for future research. Design/methodology/approach By using an explicit method for the review (Pittaway et al. , 2004) the authors selected a set of papers, which cover the knowledge domain object of this study. In total, 41 articles about “startups and OI” have been selected and the full papers have been analysed. Findings The analysed literature has been synthesized in seven sub-topics, which have been evaluated as the most relevant in explaining the phenomenon of startups in relation to OI. Implications for research, for managers and for policy makers conclude the paper. Practical implications The review produced valuable knowledge for both managers and policy decision-makers. The paper allows a better understanding of the role of startups in OI processes. This improved understanding can help managers of large firms as well as policy makers involved in OI in making their decisions. Besides, implications of OI strategies for startup managers have been singled-out. Originality/value Startup companies are intrinsically open organizations, necessarily engaged in innovation processes. Research at the intersection between the themes of OI and startups is gaining momentum. This review of the literature represents the first attempt to organize the scientific knowledge related to the intersection between the startups and OI phenomena systematically.
When it comes to agility, startups have an edge over large corporations—whereas large corporations sit on resources which startups can only dream of. The combination of entrepreneurial activity with corporate ability seems like a perfect match, but can be elusive to achieve. This article examines how large corporations from the tech industry have begun to tap into entrepreneurial innovation from startups. Prominent examples are used to inductively derive a set of four models commonly used to engage with startups and to describe their characteristics, challenges, and rationales. While corporate equity is the key mechanism behind more established models, newer approaches replace equity with shared technology to connect both worlds with fewer organizational costs and greater speed and agility. This article presents a typology of corporate mechanisms to engage with startups that balance speed and agility against control and strategic direction, to map the ways companies can bridge the gap between themselves and the startup world.
The role of a relatively small cadre of high-tech startup firms in driving innovation and economic growth has been well known and amply celebrated in recent history. At the same time, it is well recognized that, while the overall contribution of startups is crucial, the high-risk and high-reward strategy followed by these startups leads to significant failure rates and a low ratio of successful startups. So, it is curious to notice that literature tends to focus on successful startups and on quantitative studies looking for determinants of success while neglecting the numerous lessons that can be drawn by examining the stories of startups that failed. This paper aims to fill this gap and to contribute to the literature by providing a repeatable and scalable methodology that can be applied to databases of unstructured post-mortem documents deriving startup failure patterns. A further and related contribution is the analysis carried out with this methodology to a large database of 214 startup post-mortem reports. Descriptive statistics show how the lack of a structured Business Development strategy emerges as a key determinant of startup failure in the majority of cases.
Research summary: Does the degree to which founders keep control of their startups affect company value? I argue that founders face a “control dilemma” in which a startup's resource dependence drives a wedge between the startup's value and the founder's ability to retain control of decision making. I develop hypotheses about this tradeoff and test the hypotheses on a unique dataset of 6,130 American startups. I find that startups in which the founder is still in control of the board of directors and/or the CEO position are significantly less valuable than those in which the founder has given up control. On average, each additional level of founder control (i.e., controlling the board and/or the CEO position) reduces the pre‐money valuation of the startup by 17.1–22.0 percent . Managerial summary: A founder's vision and capabilities are key ingredients in the early success of a startup. During those early days, it is natural for the founder to have a powerful, central role. However, as the startup grows, founders who keep too much control of the startup and its most important decisions can harm the value of the startup. Both qualitative case studies and quantitative analyses of more than 6,000 private companies highlight that startups in which the founder has maintained control (by retaining a majority of the board of directors and/or by remaining as CEO ) have significantly lower valuations than those where the founder has relinquished control. This is especially true when the startup is three years old or more . Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Various theories that can account for employees leaving incumbent firms to start their own firms in the same industry are discussed. The theories are evaluated using evidence from three new and one old study of such employee startups in high-tech industries and from studies of high-tech and high-growth startups of all kinds. A new, evolutionary-based theory that builds on and extends existing theories is sketched out to provide a novel interpretation of the evidence. Copyright 2001 by Oxford University Press.
The startups of 14 educational-software companies are investigated from three different perspectives: entrepreneurial, organizational, and ecological. The performance and stages of development of the new firms are viewed from each perspective. The entrepreneurial perspective concentrates on the characteristics and background of the founding individual. The organizational perspective looks at the planning and initial development processes of the firms. The ecological perspective uses the population of firms as a level of analysis and is concerned with the success of the industry as a whole. These three perspectives each contribute significantly to the designing of startups of new organizations.
暂无摘要（点击查看原文获取完整内容）
This paper shows that employment in cohorts of US firms is strongly influenced by aggregate conditions at the time of their entry. Employment fluctuations of startups are procyclical, they persist into later years, and cohort-level employment variations are largely driven by differences in firm size, rather than the number of firms. An estimated general equilibrium firm dynamics model reveals that aggregate conditions at birth, rather than post-entry choices, drive the majority of cohort-level employment variation by affecting the share of startups with high growth potential. In the aggregate, changes in startup conditions result in large, slow-moving fluctuations in employment.
For-profit digital news startups backed by large investors, venture capital, and technology entrepreneurs have taken on an increasingly significant role in the journalism industry. This article examines 10 startups by focusing on the manifestos these new organizations offer when they introduce themselves to the public. These manifestos are an example of metajournalistic discourse, or interpretive discourse about journalism, that publicly define how journalism is changing—or is not. In identifying and touting the superiority of their technological innovations, the manifestos simultaneously affirm and critique existing journalistic practices while rethinking longstanding boundaries between journalism and technology.
Covid-19 has had a significant impact on the disruption of the global economic sector, including for startup businesses. This encourages entrepreneurs to carry out a continuous innovation process to become more ambidextrous and continue to innovate in an effort to futureproof their business. The paper aims to provide a business resilience framework by exploring capability (innovation ambidexterity, dynamic capability, and technology capability), behavior (agile leadership), and knowledge (knowledge stock) in startup businesses. This study uses a literature review synthesis to gain a greater understanding of startup resilience and its implementation. This study also uses a case study approach in building a framework by obtaining data from semi-structured interviews with three startups owners in Indonesia. This preliminary research has identified four propositions that will be used to develop questionnaires and data collection instruments. Thus, this study provides new insights on how startups can overcome contradictory pressures for business resilience in anticipating, dealing with, and emerging from business turbulence due to the Covid-19 pandemic by considering the factors proposed in this study. The implications and recommendations of this study are also discussed in detail.
The innovation process occurs in two ways, the Corporate Model and the Entrepreneurship model. Corporations have many competitive advantages that they can use to succeed against startups. In a one-on-one competition, the startup usually has less capital, fewer scientists and engineers, less legitimacy or brand presence, fewer strategic alliances, evolving organizational structures, and incomplete or even non-existent business processes. Young firms have the liabilities of newness and smallness, so they fail at higher rates than do their larger and older competitors. However, the structural and managerial advantages associated with established companies also disadvantage them. Innovation requires two important underlying conditions. First, resources must be mobile. Second, incentives must be aligned so that those who provide these resources, especially financial resources, succeed along with innovators who are engaged in risky activities that generally require extraordinary levels of effort. When resources are immobile, and incentives are misaligned, the innovation process in established firms slows. Under these circumstances, entrepreneurs can start companies, develop the capabilities of those companies, and bring new products to market relatively quickly.
暂无摘要（点击查看原文获取完整内容）
暂无摘要（点击查看原文获取完整内容）
暂无摘要（点击查看原文获取完整内容）
Using a large random sample of U.K. start-ups and a rich data set, the paper demonstrates that human capital is the 'true' determinant of survival and that the correlation between financial capital and survival is spurious. Provision of finance is demand-driven, with banks supplying funds elastically and business requests governing take-up. Firms self-select for funds on the basis of the human capital endowments of the proprietors with 'better' businesses more likely to borrow. A reason why others have seemingly identified start-up debt gaps may be the failure to test a sufficiently rich empirical model. Copyright 1996 by Royal Economic Society.
暂无摘要（点击查看原文获取完整内容）
Prior research has advanced several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in a nascent financial-technology market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how entrepreneurs effectively design business models: parallel play . Similar to parallel play by preschoolers, entrepreneurs engaged in parallel play interweave action, cognition, and timing to accelerate learning about a novel world. Specifically, they (1) borrow from peers and focus on established substitutes for their services or products, (2) test assumptions, then commit to a broad business-model template, and (3) pause before elaborating the activity system. The insights from our framework contribute to research on optimal distinctiveness and to the learning and evolutionary-adjustment literatures. More broadly, we blend organization theory with a fresh theoretical lens—business-model processes—to highlight how organizations actually work and create value.
Software startups are newly created companies with no operating history and oriented towards producing cutting-edge products. However, despite the increasing importance of startups in the economy, few scientific studies attempt to address software engineering issues, especially for early-stage startups. If anything, startups need engineering practices of the same level or better than those of larger companies, as their time and resources are more scarce, and one failed project can put them out of business. In this study we aim to improve understanding of the software development strategies employed by startups. We performed this state-of-practice investigation using a grounded theory approach. We packaged the results in the Greenfield Startup Model (GSM), which explains the priority of startups to release the product as quickly as possible. This strategy allows startups to verify product and market fit, and to adjust the product trajectory according to early collected user feedback. The need to shorten time-to-market, by speeding up the development through low-precision engineering activities, is counterbalanced by the need to restructure the product before targeting further growth. The resulting implications of the GSM outline challenges and gaps, pointing out opportunities for future research to develop and validate engineering practices in the startup context.