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This paper builds upon the widely-used resource-based approach to explaining survival of new technology-based firms (NTBFs). However, instead of looking at the NTBF's initial resource configuration, a process-oriented perspective is taken by focusing on the entrepreneur's ability to transform resources in response to triggers resulting from market interactions. Transaction relations reflect these interactions and are thus operationalized with a suggested method for measuring the status of venture emergence (VE) applicable to early-stage NTBFs. NTBFs' value network maturity is reflected in the number and strength of their transaction relations in the four market dimensions customer, investor, partner, and human resource. Business plans of NTBFs represent the artifact that contains this data in the form of transaction relation descriptions. Using content analysis, a multi-step combined human and computer coding process has been developed to annotate and classify transaction relations from business plans in order to empirically determine NTBFs' status of VE. Results of the business plan analysis suggest that the level of transaction relations allows to draw conclusions on the VE status. Moreover, applying the developed process, first analysis of a business plan coding test shows that the transaction relation based VE status significantly relates to NTBF survival capability.
Software startups
(2016)
Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited time frames and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models. Software startups are quite distinct from traditional mature software companies, but also from micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, introducing new challenges relevant for software engineering research. This paper’s research agenda focuses on software engineering in startups, identifying, in particular, 70+ research questions in the areas of supporting startup engineering activities, startup evolution models and patterns, ecosystems and innovation hubs, human aspects in software startups, applying startup concepts in non-startup environments, and methodologies and theories for startup research. We connect and motivate this research agenda with past studies in software startup research, while pointing out possible future directions. While all authors of this research agenda have their main background in Software Engineering or Computer Science, their interest in software startups broadens the perspective to the challenges, but also to the opportunities that emerge from multi-disciplinary research. Our audience is therefore primarily software engineering researchers, even though we aim at stimulating collaborations and research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. We believe that with this research agenda we cover a wide spectrum of the software startup industry current needs.
The business plan is one of the most frequently available artifacts to innovation intermediaries of technology-based ventures' presentations in their early stages [1]–[4]. Agreement on the evaluations of venturing projects based on the business plans highly depends on the individual perspective of the readers [5], [6]. One reason is that little empirical proof exists for descriptions in business plans that suggest survival of early-stage technology ventures [7]–[9]. We identified descriptions of transaction relations [10]–[13] as an anchor of the snapshot model business plan to business reality [13]. In the early-stage, surviving ventures are building transaction relations to human resources, financial resources, and suppliers on the input side, and customers on the output side of the business towards a stronger ego-centric value network [10]–[13]. We conceptualized a multidimensional measurement instrument that evaluates the maturity of this ego-centric value networks based on the transaction relations of different strength levels that are described in business plans of early-stage technology ventures [13]. In this paper, the research design and the instrument are purified to achieve high agreement in the evaluation of business plans [14]–[16]. As a result, we present an overall research design that can reach acceptable quality for quantitative research. The paper so contributes to the literature on business analysis in the early-stage of technology-based ventures and the research technique of content analysis.
The corporate entrepreneur
(2016)
Corporate entrepreneurship is one tool for established companies to strengthen their capabilities for strategic renewal and innovativeness. The question, however, which factors are influencing the success of a corporate entrepreneurship initiative requires further attention. The corporate entrepreneur who is acting as both the leader of embedded entrepreneurial teams and linking pin to the corporate, is providing one possible perspective. Based on 6 interviews conducted in 6 German organizations this study contributes to the understanding of the role of the corporate entrepreneur and how this role can be distinguished from other roles in the context of innovation.
Technology-based ventures provide an important route for successful technology transfer [1], [2]. Their founders are supported in successful technology commercialization by innovation intermediaries [3]. Accordingly, the performance of an innovation system, at least to some extent, depends on the efficiency of these intermediaries in terms of the impact of their scarce resources on the survival and growth of technology-based ventures. To increase their efficiency, intermediaries typically optimize their "intake" by requesting a formal business plan to base their selection on as a hygiene factor [4]-[7]. Thus, some scholars argue that written business plans show significant distortion as being produced only to attract support from innovation intermediaries [6], [8]. Accordingly, they rarely serve for these addressees as a source of information for analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of ventures, in order to derive actionable conclusions and more effectively support ventures [9], [10]. Addressees search for different indicators in business plans for their evaluation [11]. The descriptions of these indicators only evince little empirical proof for the performance of technology-based venture's [8], [12]. This gap is herein addressed, in contrast to the lacking empirical insight, as the most frequently produced artifact of early-stage technology ventures is at the same time a written business plan [10], [13]. This paper addresses this gap by conceptualizing transaction relations described in the written business plan as a means for working around the inevitable inaccuracies and uncertainties that delimit the explanatory abilities [14] of the snapshot model [10] presented by a business plan. Using a qualitative content analysis, we derive from the descriptions of transaction relations in a written business plan valid indicators for the maturity of the venture's value-network in different dimensions [15]. To this extent, this paper presents the findings from a pre-study that was conducted based on a sample of forty business plans from an overall population of 800 business plans in a longitudinal sample from one of Europe's most active innovation systems, the regional State of Baden-Württemberg. Such findings may be used by innovation intermediaries to enhance their efficiency, by enabling these to not only derive individual support strategies for business acceleration but also to analyze the impact of support measures by reliably monitoring maturity progress in venture activities.
Excubation
(2015)