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

Using online textual data, principal component analysis and artificial neural networks to study business and innovation practices in technology-driven firms

In this paper we introduce a method that combines principal component analysis, correlation analysis, K-means clustering and self organizing maps for the quantitative semantic analysis of textual data focusing on the relationship between firms' co-creation activities, the perception of their innovation and the articulation of the attributes of their product-enabled services. Principal component analysis was used to identify the components of firms' value co-creation activities and service value attributes; correlation analysis was used to examine the relationship between the degree of involvement in specific co-creation activities, the online articulation affirms' service value attributes and the perception of their innovativeness. K-means and self organizing map (SOM) are used to cluster firms with regards to their involvement in co-creation and new service development, and, additionally, as complementary tools for studying the relationship between co-creation and new service development.The results show that, first, there is a statistically significant relationship between firms' degree of involvement in co-creation activities and the degree of articulation of their service value attributes; second, the relationship should be Considered within the context of firms' innovation activities; third, OS Software-driven firms are the best example in terms of co-creation and new product-enabled service development, i.e. the collaborative principles built in their customer participation platforms should be adopted by other (non-software) firms interested in enhancing their innovation capacity through involvement in co-creation and new product-enabled service development. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved