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Third actor introductions to interaction episodes aiming at fast-forwarding new firm relationship development
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to address third actor introductions to interaction episodes aiming at fast-forwarding the continuous development of business relationships of new firms.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is qualitative, collecting data from 30 interviews from 28 informants associated with creation of new ventures and business network development in the context of a novel type of third actor called venture builder. Venture builders are privately owned organizations devoted to new firm creation in a factory-like mode, collaborating with individual entrepreneurs.
Findings
The findings suggest that interaction episodes, central to the development of new relationships, may be triggered by introductions managed by third actors using different types of involvement depending on the location and focus of the potential relationship. A framework is presented including four types of introductions to interaction episodes, aiming at saving time by removing the perceived distance between new firms and their counterparts in the initiation of business relationships. The framework describes four types of introductions of interaction episodes: Managed, Advised, Facilitated and Monitored.
Originality/value
Triggers and introductions of interaction episodes for new firms has previously been sparsely addressed. This paper presents how third actor involvement, by the introductions of interaction episodes with internal and external counterparts is managed with an aim of fast-forwarding relationship development.
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The reproduction of social relationships in a rural tourism destination is examined through a micro-sociological lens that explores residents’ everyday interactions. Interaction ritual theory is adopted as the theoretical foundation. Zhinan, a mountainous village in Hangzhou, China, which initiated tourism in 2014, is the study site. Two rounds of focus groups and interviews were conducted with village residents. Qualitative inquiry shows that, under the influence of tourism, residents’ daily interactions consist of three interaction rituals, that is, rural living rituals, tourism operation rituals, and event and festival rituals. Due to the distinct ingredients, these rituals unfold differentially and engage different social actors. They complement each other in the co-construction of rural social relationships that have symbolic, emotional, collective, and normative connotations. This study provides in-depth, contextualized understandings of rural residents’ interactions and relationships, and draws practical implications for sustainable development of rural tourism destinations.
Student entrepreneurship is an important but not well-studied field of research. Student venturing activity is characterized by the lack of experience and expertise among founders, which is a critical barrier in technology-based venturing. Through an in-depth qualitative study of a student venture incubation initiative, the present paper finds that to support student ventures in overcoming this barrier, the recruitment of skilled students with sufficient technical knowledge is the most essential. Several different actors are involved in the process, and the support for student ventures tends to be informal and need-driven rather than structured, formal, and university-prescribed. The multiple actors, both internal and external to the university, are complementary for student venture incubation. This perspective indicates the need for university managers and policy makers to support several multiple actors. Value creation from student entrepreneurship could further be boosted by improved team recruitment activities such as matchmaking events and other networking activities at the university.
Purpose
Incubators, as providers of advice and resources, suggest fostering the development of early-idea firms. Literature and practice seem to suggest an ever-increasing amount of incubator support. The creation of business relationships is at the heart of any business development, and this paper addresses whether a laissez-faire incubator fosters the creation of business relationships. The purpose of this paper is to explore the creation of business relationships among incubated firms during and after their time in the incubator along with the roles that these relationships play for the incubated firms.
Design/methodology/approach
Empirically, the paper is based on retrospective interviews with representatives of all incubated firms in a university incubator. A total of fifteen interviews were conducted with representatives of the incubated firms, the incubator and its owners, complemented by secondary data sources.
Findings
The paper points out three antecedents for business relationship creation: the lack of experience and connections; convenience; and trust based on the interactions with others in the incubator. These antecedents are connected to the roles of transforming businesses and of adaptation in the dyadic relationships. The laissez-faire incubator helped through the learning-by-doing among the incubated firms, which made them focus on business relationship creation from early on.
Originality/value
Most incubator research portrays the unilateral transfer of knowledge from the incubator to the incubated firm, with the latter being a service taker rather than a co-producer. The paper adds knowledge about business relationships among firms in incubators and the roles that these business relationships could play for the firms. The focus on an incubator providing limited support is of high practical relevance, given the trend of incubators facilitating more and more services.
Organizational routines emerge in firms during the process of new venture creation. Typically, they are imprinted and sometimes replicated by the entrepreneurs creating the organization, reflecting individual and contextual characteristics. In particular cases, organizations are designed for replicating routines for new ventures. The authors investigate one such case from the IT industry using a dynamic routine perspective and focus on how routines originally created by an organization are replicated in several new ventures. In more detail, the authors focus on how routine replication counter-intuitively allows for innovating in new venture creation. The authors find that routine replication supports entrepreneurial innovation in three ways: (1) the replicator organization’s accelerating routines unburden the replicator organization’s innovating routines; (2) the replicator organization’s accelerating routines unburden the new venture’s innovating routines; and (3) the new venture’s accelerating routines unburden the new venture’s innovating routines. The authors contribute to the discussion about the replication dilemma by conceptualizing “unburdening” as a mechanism that allows both routinization and innovation benefits to be reaped.
While some firms build cars or smartphones, Rocket Internet builds companies. The incubator and investment firm has pioneered an extreme approach to new venture creation that is often referred to as a “startup factory:” it rapidly assembles and scales new companies, replicating business models that have been developed elsewhere. Separating the ideation of business models from their execution allows Rocket Internet to specialize on the latter, because it eliminates the need to create an environment that is conducive to both processes. Yet specialization may also be Rocket Internet’s largest liability, because it makes the firm dependent on the availability of appropriate (co-specialized) business models. In this edition of the Organization Zoo series, we asked several organizational scientists and scholars of entrepreneurship to share their thoughts on what we can learn from the case of Rocket Internet.
In this paper we qualitatively explore the phenomenon of company builders – a new form of venture incubation that has only recently been established. The paper distinguishes company builders from other incubation models, analyses their organizational structure and maps their new venture creation process. Based on a multiple case study of nine company builders located in three European start-up hubs, we find that organizational structures of company builders are dependent on organization size. Company builders with less than 50 employees tend to feature functional line organizations, while larger company builders feature project-matrix organizations. In terms of venture creation process, company builders follow a seven step process, which is mapped in terms of inputs, activities and outputs. We discuss the implications of this study for the extant literature and offer directions for future research.
Incubators are a prominent way to support technology based start-ups. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent these incubators enhance start-up performance, nor is it known through which mechanisms this would occur. In this paper we test two mechanisms to explain the relationship between incubation and the amount of investments raised by early stage start-ups as performance measure. The ‘hit maker’ mechanism refers to beneficial effects of the direct transfer of resources and organizational or business knowledge from the incubator to the start-up. The ‘network broker’ mechanism refers to the benefits that start-ups enjoy from being connected to external funding sources through the incubator’s networks. We test which of these mechanisms contribute to the performance of early stage start-ups. Our data comes from a unique survey from 935 entrepreneurs with early-stage technology based start-ups in Western Europe and North America. We find that incubators have a positive effect on (1) the amount of funding that start-ups attract and (2) the ability of start-ups to attract funding from formal investors and banks. Moreover, our results provide evidence for the network broker mechanism, but not for the hit maker mechanism.
Failure to reach data saturation has an impact on the quality of the research conducted and hampers content validity. The aim of a study should include what determines when data saturation is achieved, for a small study will reach saturation more rapidly than a larger study. Data saturation is reached when there is enough information to replicate the study when the ability to obtain additional new information has been attained, and when further coding is no longer feasible. The following article critiques two qualitative studies for data saturation: Wolcott (2004) and Landau and Drori (2008). Failure to reach data saturation has a negative impact on the validity on one’s research. The intended audience is novice student researchers. © 2015: Patricia I. Fusch, Lawrence R. Ness, and Nova Southeastern University.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to systematically review the relationship and networking strategy tools in the IMP literature. It proposes six dimensions for characterizing such tools: approach to tool development, level (and layer) of analysis, perspective of interaction, activities of network strategizing, external or internal orientation and use for “strategizing on” vs “strategizing in” relationships and networks.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper uses a manual qualitative content analysis approach and an inductive approach, well suited for extracting relationship and networking strategy tools due to their implicit and dispersed nature.
Findings
– The paper presents an IMP toolbox comprising a wide variety of relationship and networking strategy tools emphasizing interconnectedness, interdependence and limited managerial autonomy, as well as an analysis of how identified tools are positioned along each of the six proposed dimensions.
Research limitations/implications
– This paper contributes a conceptual framework with a vocabulary to content analyze and discuss relationship and networking strategy tools in IMP research.
Practical implications
– The IMP toolbox may be a useful point of departure for managers who feel a need for developing and using a mix of tools for strategizing in business relationships and networks.
Originality/value
– The paper instills a strategy tool lens in the IMP literature and foregrounds strategizing concepts and techniques that were previously difficult to attend to for both researchers and practitioners.
Generalized reciprocity is a widely recognized but little studied component of social capital in organizations. We develop a causal model of the multiple mechanisms that sustain generalized reciprocity in an organization, drawing together disparate literatures in the social, organizational, and biological sciences. We conduct the first-ever critical test of two key mechanisms: paying it forward and rewarding reputation. These are fundamentally different grammars of organizing, either of which could sustain a system of generalized reciprocity. In an organization, paying it forward is a type of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) that occurs when members of an organization help third parties because they themselves were helped. Rewarding reputation is a type of OCB that occurs when peers monitor one another, helping those who help others and refusing to help those who do not. Using behavioral data collected from members of two organizational groups over a three-month period, we found that reputational effects were strongest in the short term but decayed thereafter. Paying it forward had stronger and more lasting effects. Dominant theories assume that rewarding reputation is the main cause of generalized reciprocity, but our analysis demonstrates that generalized reciprocity in an organization occurs for multiple reasons. We use the empirical findings to develop propositions about the mechanisms of generalized reciprocity in organizations and link these to management practices. Our study contributes to social exchange theory, macro-level prosocial behavior, OCB, positive organizational scholarship, and management.
A simple model is developed here that relates organizational age and mortality rates. The critical insight of the analysis is that surviving organizations will tend to be organizations that were, in prior periods, successful, and this prior success, in turn, will buffer them from subsequent selection pressures. The model is then tested using data on the Argentinian and Irish newspaper industries. Further empirical analysis examines the degree of heterogeneity in these two populations of organizations, and a subsequent parametric analysis provides some insight as to the sources of this heterogeneity.
For all its richness and potential for discovery, qualitative research has been critiqued as too often lacking in scholarly rigor. The authors summarize a systematic approach to new concept development and grounded theory articulation that is designed to bring “qualitative rigor” to the conduct and presentation of inductive research.
Business marketing is a complex, multilayered, and dynamic social phenomenon that has been examined using a variety of theories from disciplines as diverse as economics and psychology. This theoretical evolution has led to a fragmented knowledge base. This article examines relationship marketing and business networks perspectives in business marketing. Based on an extensive metatheoretical review, the study shows that these approaches are based on incompatible theoretical assumptions and cannot be integrated into a general relationship marketing theory. By constructing an articulated theory map, the paper provides a positioning space and analysis of five approaches to business marketing: CRM, behaviorally driven relationship marketing, channel relationships, market as networks and actor relationships, and focal networks and strategic nets. The paper then suggests pursuing the development of two middle-range theories: “market-based business marketing” and “network-based business marketing.” These developments are used to offer an articulated research agenda for advancing business marketing theory and a discussion on the possibility of a general theory of marketing.
During the past two decades we have witnessed a rather impressive growth of theoretical innovations and conceptual revisions of epistemological and methodological approaches within constructivist-qualitative quarters of the social sciences. Methodological discussions have commonly addressed a variety of methods for collecting and analyzing empirical material, yet the critical grounds upon which these were reformulated have rarely been extended to embrace sampling concepts and procedures. The latter have been overlooked, qualifying only as a 'technical' research stage. This article attends to snowball sampling via constructivist and feminist hermeneutics, suggesting that when viewed critically, this popular sampling method can generate a unique type of social knowledge—knowledge which is emergent, political and interactional. The article reflects upon researches about backpacker tourists and marginalized men, where snowball sampling was successfully employed in investigating these groups' organic social networks and social dynamics. In both studies, interesting interrelations were found between sampling and interviewing facets, leading to a reconceptualization of the method of snowball sampling in terms of power relations, social networks and social capital.
An understanding of business networks and the specific processes affecting change in networks is intimately connected to the understanding of the nature of relationships. Relationships constitute the core aspect which connects actors, resources and activities in a business network. Presents an overview of basic features of relationships. Groups relational concepts from the business marketing literature into structural, economic and social dimensions. Outlines a marketing model of three network layers in business networks based on different types of actors. The proposed network layers in the model constitute the production network layer, the resource network layer and the social network layer. Finally, assigns relational concepts to their related network layers in a relationship matrix.
Notes buyer-seller interdependence is crucial to industrial marketing — industrial firms establish buyer-seller relationships of the close kind and long term. Examines buyer-seller nature in industrial markets by considering development as a process through time, it is based on ideas from the IMP Project. Analyses the process of establishment and development of relationship over time by considering stages in revolution. Notes also that this process described herein does not argue the inevitability of relationship development. Discusses the pre-relationship stage: the early stage; the development stage; the long-term stage; and the final stage with points to debate. Describes how the development of buyer-seller relationships can be seen as a process in terms of: the increasing experience of the two companies; reduction in their uncertainty and the distance between them; growth of both actual and perceived commitment; formal and informal adaptation to each other and the investments and savings involved. Finally, states it is important to emphasize that companies should examine existing relationships according to the potential and stage of development.
In the present chapter, we focus on how start-ups become embedded in the university and industry context(s) in order to suggest a research agenda for a more systemic approach to university and industry actors when studying start-up development in entrepreneurial universities. More specifically, the story should not end in business formation but an entrepreneurial university also has roles in the further development of start-ups originating both from the university and industry. We base our suggested research agenda on a case study of the automotive and transport cluster in Western Sweden, which is established as both an academic context and an industry context. We relied both on secondary data about the case as such as well as primary data about the relationship development patterns of the 9 start-ups in the cluster. We identified 5 different patterns of how start-ups become embedded. Arguing that the development and success of university-based start-ups have to be understood in terms of how they embed in their context(s) entails several important implications for further studies connected to additional details of the development patterns, the roles universities play in the networking and embedding of start-ups and the design of collaborative platforms for collaboration between various actors.
New ventures face both liabilities of newness and smallness, which may inhibit their innovation efforts and output. However, existing research has not clearly distinguished between the two liabilities, leaving it unclear how certain determinants differentially affect innovation performance in start-ups relative to older established small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Therefore, in this study we investigate the impact of R&D investments, external knowledge sourcing and public R&D subsidies on innovation effectiveness in new versus older small firms. Employing panel data from the Spanish Community Innovation Survey (CIS), we show that R&D investments have a lower contribution to the innovation performance of new ventures, compared to older small firms. In contrast, we find that external knowledge sourcing makes a higher contribution to the innovation performance of new compared to older small firms, but only in high-tech settings. However, we find no support for a differentiating effect of R&D subsidies in new versus established small firms. Effectively, our results highlight the limited effects of internal R&D investments and R&D policy instruments to promote the growth of innovative start-ups, while highlighting potential benefits of their openness to external sources of innovation. As such, these results have important implications for research, practices and policies that relate to innovation in new ventures and SMEs, while casting doubts on the effectiveness of some of the common strategy and policy instruments to stimulate performance in small innovative start-ups.
As a research field, entrepreneurship emerged from an increasing interest in fostering new business ventures. Over the past decade, interest in entrepreneurial phenomena also triggered several studies in the IMP research stream. We examine connections between these two research streams in terms of the phenomena in focus, key concepts, and approaches to identify research areas fruitful for advancing our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena. In pursuit of this aim, we analyzed 48 IMP-based entrepreneurship studies and the abstracts of the 227 most cited papers in eight main entrepreneurship journals; among the latter, we conducted an in-depth analysis of 30 articles, in which we found connections with IMP studies. Based on our analysis, we identify four directions for future research, where confronting and bridging the key concepts has the potential to contribute to conceptualizing entrepreneurial phenomena and related theory development. The four areas are: variety in the context of new ventures; multiplicity of networks embedding new ventures; connecting the new venture to its context; and the new venture's learning and management.
The industrial network literature contains underlying assumptions about the nature of business relationships. We use change as a vehicle to unearth these assumptions and conduct a systematic review of change in business relationships in the industrial network literature. We identify three approaches to business relationships: agency, structure and practice. Our research contributes to the industrial network literature by explicating how change in business relationships is derived implicitly from what people do, the surrounding structures, or the logic underlying their action. This research helps provide construct clarity by elaborating the key assumptions and key constructs of the three approaches as well their implications for business relationships research.
To promote economic growth and overcome societal challenges, policy-makers often try to shape an entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) that will facilitate technological entrepreneurship. An EE consists of a knowledge subsystem and a business subsystem, which are often unconnected. A financial support network (FSN) consisting of startups and private venture capitalists can bridge two subsystems and thus enable critical technology transfer in EEs. These FSNs remain underdeveloped in many European regions, however; the literature on innovation systems refers to this lack of connectivity as a “weak network problem.” While incubators can function as intermediaries to overcome such weak network problems, how they do so is poorly understood. This research thus poses the following research question: What is the effect of incubators’ support mechanisms on the occurrence of weak network problems in entrepreneurial ecosystems? We develop a theoretical model in which network development is a function of two processes: “meeting” and “mating.” We argue how different incubator support mechanisms influence these two processes; we then apply these insights in an agent-based model, which allows for estimating how much each support mechanism contributes to overcoming weak network problems in the FSN. Our simulation shows that developing a strong network among startups is key to overcoming weak network problems in FSNs. The most effective way to do so is to introduce incubated startups to non-incubated startups through field-building. Our results provide new theoretical insights into how networks in EEs and innovation systems develop, and what role incubators play as intermediaries in this process. The systemic benefits of incubators also greatly enhance their societal value proposition.
In business-to-business settings, dyadic relationships between firms are of paramount interest. Recent developments in business practice strongly suggest that to understand these business relationships, greater attention must be directed to the embedded context within which dyadic business relationships take place. The authors provide a means for understanding the connectedness of these relationships. They then conduct a substantive validity assessment to furnish some empirical support that the constructs they propose are sufficiently well delineated and to generate some suggested measures for them. They conclude with a prospectus for research on business relationships within business networks.
This article introduces Industrial Marketing Management's special issue on start-ups and networks. To begin with, we stress the relevance of understanding the context wherein entrepreneurship unfolds - a context filled with social, technical and economic connections to which the start-up needs to relate. We also present and confront three network perspectives which bring different insights to the interplay between start-ups and networks: Social Network (SN) theory, the Industrial Marketing & Purchasing (IMP) view, and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Next, we introduce the 12 papers of this special issue and place them on a continuum covering a start-up's process of network embedding and including the three periods of establishment, consolidation and stabilization. We conclude with a research agenda suggesting five avenues for further research: (1) tracing start-ups' process of network embedding, (2) mapping the connections between the different networks affecting a start-up, (3) grasping the negative effects of networks on start-ups, (4) making longitudinal case studies on start-ups and networks more comparable via common analytical tools, and (5) investigating how policy influences the complex interplay between start-ups and networks.
New business ventures have rather limited resources, generally suffer from liabilities of smallness and newness and rely on external business relationships, typically with suppliers, for developing and acquiring necessary resources. Yet, to date, research on how new ventures develop initial relationships with suppliers and how these affect the nascent business has been limited. Taking the business network perspective and relating it to studies of supply chain and supplier involvement in product development, our study contributes to the rather limited body of knowledge on new ventures' supplier relationships. Empirically, we draw on a longitudinal, in-depth single-case study of the first two years of operation of a start-up. Our study shows that the development of the key initial supplier relationships starts from open-ended expectations of mutual future relational benefits and involves a stepwise 'inter-definition' of solutions in interaction between the parties. We observe that interdependences arise between the new venture and its key suppliers and these enable but also limit, the development paths of both partners. We argue that the key initial supplier relationships extend a new venture's resource and capability base and are an integral part of a new venture's business model.
Power plays a key role in the relationships between startups and established organisations. Yet researchers have devoted little attention to the startup's perspective on power in such relationships. To study startups' view on power, a useful starting point is their structural power, but this also requires an investigation of their power behaviour. We explore how structural and behavioural power interrelate in a startup's relationships with its established partners in the medical device business. Our longitudinal, embedded case study reveals nine interaction episodes in which power plays a decisive role. The power episodes show that the case startup often uses hostile power use tactics because it overestimates its structural power. Since its established partners recognise its lack of power, they usually do not accept such behaviour. Thus, the case startup could not extract the intended benefits. Nonetheless, we find that the case startup could benefit from its relationships if it employs conciliatory power use tactics or power change tactics. With these insights, we contribute to the startup business relationship literature by providing a better understanding of startups' experience with power. We also extend the power literature by showing that it is the perception of power that determines power behaviour rather than the de facto structural potential.
Incubators are organisations or structures that usually offer five types of services in order to accelerate start-up development: access to physical resources, administrative services, access to financial resources, assistance with start-up procedures and access to networks. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the mediating role of the incubator. More specifically, it examines how the incubator's mediation is related to incubator firms' development of broader business networks. The primary data comprised 34 face-to-face interviews with 19 respondents from an incubator and its incubator firms and with other actors with which the incubator had a relationship. The paper offers three conclusions concerning how the network horizon influences the incubator's capacity to mediate relationships, the necessity for incubator firms to be proactive in order to utilise the mediation activities of the incubator and the influence of public-funding agencies in the development of incubator firms, which is based on their role as third actors in connected business relationships.
Business-to-business (B2B) and business network scholars have begun adopting an "ecosystem" approach to describe the increasing interdependence and co-evolution of contemporary business and innovation activities. Although the concept is useful in communicating these issues, the challenge is the lack of overall understanding of the added value of the approach, its particular theoretical logic, and its links to network management. This systematic review analyzes the usage of the ecosystem concept in B2B journals and its implications for network management. Common themes are distilled, the specific features of the ecosystem approach are examined, and four categories of the ecosystem approach are identified: (a) competition and evolution; (b) emergence and disruption; (c) stable business exchange; and (d) value co-creation. We also examine shifts in management opportunities and challenges related to these developments. Finally, we suggest a revised network management framework, where we address the implications of utilizing an ecosystem layer for the analysis, as well as using the ecosystem as a perspective in the management of business and innovation networks. Overall, this study contributes to the literature by providing a coherence-seeking, systematic outlook on the increasingly useful, but still nascent and ambiguously utilized ecosystem approach.
Purpose
To develop an understanding of how start-ups initiate business relationships and to identify the subprocesses that characterise business-relationship initiations in a start-up context.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper builds on business relationship–initiation models, develops a theoretical framework of relationship initiation and its subprocesses and, in a multiple-case study, applies this framework to seven relationship initiations by start-ups.
Findings
The key findings of this study describe the process of business-relationship initiation by start-ups, which comprises six subprocesses. Our detailed and structured initiation-process analyses show how the initiation process occurs in a start-up context and how start-ups develop their relationships. Our analyses also reveal typical patterns and critical issues, such as asymmetry, that characterise start-ups’ business-relationship initiations, particularly with bigger players.
Research limitations/implications
This paper develops a model of the relationship-initiation process, uses it in a start-up context and identifies the critical characteristics, including asymmetry, of start-up initiations; these contributions address both the literature on start-ups and the literature on relationship initiation and development.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to focus on how start-ups initiate business relationships; previous studies of business-relationship initiation have focused on mature firms. Using the industrial marketing and purchasing approach, the paper contributes to shifting the focus from interactions between resource entities to relationship-initiation processes in the context of start-ups.
Prior research on age dependence describes entire populations as exhibiting a liability of newness, adolescence, or obsolescence. By comparison, this study considers how strategy affects aging. A study of firms in the U.S. personal computer industry reveals that age dependence varied not only by strategy, but also across outcomes.
Start-ups are often born in some kind of ‘hosting’ environment such as business and university incubators or science technology parks. For decades, this has been considered an important measure of enhancing academic entrepreneurship (Grimaldi, Kenney, Siegel, & Wright, 2011) and the beginning of a start-up’s journey towards becoming a full-grown business. In this chapter, we aim to examine the challenges that start-ups meet when they begin to acquire the shape of a business venture and attempt to develop commercially viable business relationships with customers and suppliers.
During the last few years, several authors have recognised the need for more research into how start-ups or new business ventures initiate new relationships. Aaboen, Dubois and Lind (2011) studied how start-up firms develop their initial customer relationships and resource base in close interaction with customers. Furthermore, La Rocca, Ford and Snehota (2013) argued that even though developing new business relationships is demanding for all types of firms, it is particularly critical for start-ups because their offerings are likely to be less developed than the offerings of established firms. Thus, it is a newly developed interest to study, understand and manage the process of initiating business relationships for start-ups.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to address three aspects of the managerial challenge that arises from the process of business interaction: the diversity of interaction; the dynamic effects of interaction; and the integration of interaction into company operations and strategy. The paper develops a typology which characterizes different types of interaction in order to identify the managerial issues they represent.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper is based on the empirical research programme of the IMP Group (impgroup.org) and on a recent large scale research project within that programme.
Findings
– The paper seeks to identify the dynamic effects of each type of interaction on the resources and activities involved in it and address the implications that these effects have for management. Finally, the paper discusses how the challenges and opportunities presented by business interaction can be integrated into the general management of a company.
Research limitations/implications
– The paper is mainly based on detailed empirical observations focusing some special features. Focusing other aspects would give another result.
Practical implications
– Important for all companies having important business relationships.
Originality/value
– Gives a new view of managerial challenges related to the variety in business relationships.
Relying on an in-depth case study of the incubator related to the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute's (KI), this paper identifies new analytical and strategic dimensions of incubation. Departing from the current literature's prevalent focus on incubators as organizations performing a predefined set of activities for incubatees (facility renting, coaching, training and connecting), we perform a multilevel analysis embracing, next to the organizational and the project-specific levels, also the broader institutional and inter-organizational level. Our analysis relies on seven key components of incubation, namely its time, place, sources, resources, control/governance, activities/services and outcomes. Further, we view incubators as strategic actors engaged in value creation on a broader arena than the strict incubation context, even an international arena, where incubators' choices and interactions can be analyzed with the help of concepts from various streams in the business strategy literature. The specific strategic drivers of business incubation that we identify in the KI incubator's case are six: positioning in the value chain, risk taking/time perspective, revenue model, governance/control, internationalization, and cooperation/competition. The paper concludes with managerial implications urging incubators to take more of a strategic perspective rather than focussing only on the established components of their operations.
Purpose
– Recently, increased interest has been devoted to discuss theory development in relation to business-to-business (B2B) marketing. The purpose of this paper is to explore these thoughts through describing and analyzing research on the internationalization of firms from an Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) perspective. The authors ask: to what extent have these studies resulted in a theory of internationalization?
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper is conceptual and frames research on the internationalization of firms by means of definitions, domains, relations of variables and predictions. It looks into research on internationalization based on an IMP-inspired network perspective to see to what extent research has resulted in theories of internationalization.
Findings
– While there have been substantial efforts on theorizing related to IMP-based internationalization studies, the research has not yet resulted in theory.
Research limitations/implications
– In this paper one phenomenon was selected that has already been addressed in IMP research, namely, the internationalization of firms. Had the authors chosen another phenomenon previously studied in IMP the findings might had turned out differently.
Originality/value
– The paper makes a contribution to understanding how ideas are developed, used and referenced in long-term research development for the specific phenomenon of internationalization. The paper contributes to the debate on theories within B2B research.
This paper identifies different university spin-off (USO) roles related to resource interaction among business parties. It does so by mapping how USOs become part of business networks in terms of their roles relative to other parties. The theoretical frame of reference focuses on roles and resource interaction based on an industrial network approach to business markets. The empirical research is based on five cases of USOs representing a variety in terms of technology, degree of newness, sector, and area of application. As a result of the analysis, three different roles are identified: the USO as resource mediator, resource re-combiner and resource renewer. These roles reflect how USOs adapt resources to, or require changes among, business parties' resources. The paper also discusses the main resource interfaces associated with the three roles and related challenges. The paper contributes to previous research through illustrating USOs' roles relative to business parties from a resource interaction point of view, and by pointing to the establishment of new companies in business networks as a way of implementing innovation. Finally, the paper discusses the managerial implications of the research in terms of the USO's need to understand which role to take and how to develop it.
Few studies have looked at the innovation process in the early stages of new business ventures in the context of business networks. Reporting on eight years of development of a new venture, we examine how the development of initial business relationships in an ever-changing business network affects technological innovation. We conclude that technological innovation is contingent on the development of business relationships that are a critical mechanism permitting a new venture not only to access but also to produce knowledge essential for innovating. For management this implies the need to strike a judicious balance between internal focus and closure to produce novel solutions and external focus and openness to experiment in business relationships.
Strategizing as networking has become a powerful theme particularly in the IMP tradition. This paper focuses on new ventures and how these develop through the relationships formed by them. Strategizing through network development concerns how the firm perceives its network of interconnected relationships and how it interacts with other actors in relation to these perceptions. The aim of the paper is to identify patterns in the network development of new ventures and in how their strategizing relates to this development. The paper is based on a longitudinal case study of three new ventures. The case study captures the firms' ‘stories’ of how the networks of relationships have developed since their start. Based on the case illustrations we identify three patterns of how the new ventures strategize in their networking and how they network in their strategizing. These patterns concern: (1) exploration and exploitation of similarities, (2) knowledge sharing among customers, and (3) developing relationships with mediating partners. All three rely on interaction with counterparts that provide access to external resources which is of particular importance for new ventures.
This paper seeks to investigate some of the issues faced by an existing company when developing the initial customer relationships for a new venture. All companies face the challenge of new-relationship development in order to achieve growth and to replace relationships which have been lost or are in decline. But the challenge of developing the first customer relationships of a new venture is likely to be particularly acute because the new venture's marketing function and its offering to customers are likely to be undefined and undeveloped. This paper is based on a case study of initial customer relationship development in a new venture of an established business. The paper analyses the issues that the company faced in developing these initial relationships and the approaches to relationship development that it took. The case analysis leads to the conclusion that the development of initial relationships can be facilitated by an ‘open marketing function’ involving a number of functional areas both in the supplier and in the initial customers. The paper draws managerial implications from the case analysis for the task of marketing in this situation.
Industrial marketing and purchasing is an interesting phenomenon. On the surface it appears as very mundane, a simple day-to-day activity performed by purchasers, sales personnel, and technical specialists; i.e. most often by professions representing ‘middle management’. As such, it is not surrounded with any of the greater prestige ascribed to more hyped business activities, such as financing and strategy. Furthermore, industrial marketing and purchasing is seldom recognised as being of any greater importance for society at large. In policy circles, for example the UN, OECD and EU, where they stress the importance of innovation, productivity and growth, industrial marketing and purchasing is rarely mentioned as a related phenomenon.Behind the scenes, however, an empirical, much more challenging view is outlined. When the content and the effects of industrial marketing and purchasing processes are scrutinised empirically, these activities appear as perhaps the most important source for business development, industrial renewal, efficiency and innovation. From this perspective, industrial marketing and purchasing seems to be a critical phenomenon for creating prosperity for both companies and communities and for general economic growth. It is this role of industrial marketing and purchasing that we highlight and discuss in this article. Based on extensive empirical research results, we argue that interaction is the main ingredient in these processes. This implies that the supplier–customer interaction has a central development function for efficiency and innovativeness, for companies as well as for the economy at large. Thus, there is a strong need to include and consider this key engine for dynamics (and its role in developing materialised structures as well as ideas) in any theoretical study of economic development.
The reflective and interrogative processes required for developing effective qualitative research questions can give shape and direction to a study in ways that are often underestimated. Good research questions do not necessarily produce good research, but poorly conceived or constructed questions will likely create problems that affect all subsequent stages of a study. In qualitative studies, the ongoing process of questioning is an integral part of understanding the unfolding lives and perspectives of others. This article addresses both the development of initial research questions and how the processes of generating and refining questions are critical to the shaping of a qualitative study.
Unlike prior research on organizational age dependence, which has described entire populations as exhibiting a liability of newness, adolescence, or obsolescence, this study adopts a contingent view by considering the interactive effects of age and technology strategy. Distinctions are drawn between proprietary strategists, who use internally developed, firm-specific technologies, and standards-based strategists, whose technologies conform with open and publicly available specifications. Results of a study of the firms in the U.S. personal computer industry show that technology strategy had two important influences on aging. First, age dependence varied across strategies. For example, standards-based strategists exhibited a liability of adolescence in their failure rates, while proprietary strategists exhibited a liability of obsolescence. Second, the joint effects of age and strategy produced long-term trade-offs across different performance outcomes. For instance, rates of sales growth increased with age for proprietary strategists, yet so did their risks of failure. Overall, this study suggests that multiple patterns of age dependence may simultaneously exist within a single population.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to re‐examine the challenges that were made in the original International Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) project, in the light of all the changes that have occurred in the business world since 1982.
Design/methodology/approach
– Although some of these challenges have been widely accepted, some have not and much further development of the ideas behind them is needed. The article examines what has happened in business practice and theory that is in line with the challenges. It also highlights those areas where little has happened. This analysis then forms the basis for a discussion of what ideas may now need to be radically challenged again. In doing this, the paper relates the authors' ideas to the dominant marketing paradigm and to the evolving empirical trends in business.
Findings
– The original IMP project challenged both the structure and process of business. The challenge was to the idea of the business world as an atomistic structure of independent actors within markets. Instead, a structure of relationships between interdependent companies was suggested. The challenge to process was to the idea of independent action and the authors' view of business was based on the interaction between these interdependent companies. The analysis in this paper suggests that the challenge to ideas on the structure of the business world has been partially accepted, but that the challenge to the idea of independent company action has not.
Originality/value
– The paper suggests reasons for this difference in impact. It emphasises that many approaches to understanding and managing business relationships are based on the false idea that relationships are some kind of management technique that can be employed by managers at their discretion. The paper suggests instead that business relationships are an inevitable outcome from the nature of business and hence beyond the complete control of either participating company. The paper also suggests that an interaction view has profound implications for authors' view of the nature of business and business activity. The paper presents a detailed comparison of the differences between a world based on markets and action and one based on relationships and interaction. It concludes with the thought that increasing one's understanding of the nature of business interaction will be a prime task in the future for the IMP Group, for businesses researchers in general and for managers.