The emergence of the lean global start-up as a new type of firm

This article contributes to the interplay between international entrepreneurship, innovation networks, and early internationalization research by emphasizing the need to conceptualize and introduce a new type of firm: the lean global startup. It discussed two different paths in linking the lean startup and born-global internationalization strategies. The first path refers to generic lean startups that have undertaken a rapid internationalization strategy (i.e., lean-to-global startups). The second path refers to startups that have started operating on global scale since their inception and adopted the lean startup approach by seamlessly synergizing their global and lean product development activities. The article emphasizes several aspects that could be used as part of the theoretical foundation for conceptualizing lean global startups as a special new type of firm: i) the emergent nature of their business models, including the challenges of partnership development on a global scale; ii) the inherently relational nature of the global resource allocation processes; iii) the integration of the entrepreneurial, effectuation, and global marketing perspectives; iv) the need to deal with a high degree of uncertainty, including the uncertainty associated with cross-border business operations; and v) linking the ex-ante characteristics of lean startups with the ex-post characteristics of born-global firms in order to develop a technology adoption marketing perspective that considers the “crossing the chasm” process as a successful entry into a global market niche

Towards the Development of a Research Methodology for Studying the Nature of Value Co-Creation in Internet Driven Businesses

Value co-creation, is an emerging innovation, marketing and business paradigm describing how customers and users are seen as active participants in the design of personalized products, services and experiences (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Payne, Storbacka, & Frow, 2008). Often this participation is organised via the Internet to enable the opportunity for customers to integrate their knowledge, experience and skills into existing, modified or entirely new market offerings reflecting their personal preferences, needs and contexts (Sawhney, Gianmario & Prandelli, 2005). There is a growing body of literature dedicated to the discussion of value co-creation frameworks, mechanisms and processes, however, these typically focus on the study, discussion and analysis of a small number of cases using deep, ethnographic description of their practices aiming at conceptualization and categorization of the different types of interactions between end users, the firm and the value network. Although very useful, such an approach misses the advantages of an empirically driven quantitative approach that would be able to benefit from larger size samples of firms and that could be more appropriate for theory building through the development and testing of hypotheses

Integrating the gender dimension to disclose the degree of businesses’ articulation of innovation

In this contribution, we examine the relationship between the presence of women in companies’ Boards and innovation communication claims: we propose a framework to quantitatively assess the presence of women and the online articulation of innovation, in order to understand whether some correlations hold between these two variables. We also introduce a neural network approach to predict the innovation metric that uses, amongst the predictors, the gender component, and we compare it with a linear regression analysis. Results indicate that neural networks may be used to predict the articulation of innovation by using a predictor set that includes the gender component of the Board of Directors, and also that the use of the gender metric improves previous predictions about the articulation of innovation model’s output