New Ventures' Entry Strategies in their Start-up Process

This paper departs from the basic understanding that venture creation processes are not uniformed but dependent on situational and contextual factors. In focus here is the impact of the new ventures’ knowledge level (e.g. technology). Following a case-study based design, two types of new firms are studied; academic spin-offs and generic ventures. Six new venture founders, three academic and three generic ventures, described their start-up process from idea generation to today’s business activity with the purpose of explaining their specific start-up process. The findings show that generic ventures and academic spin-offs have different basis for their venture creation and follow different strategies to enter a market. The academic spin-offs are to a larger extent product oriented and enter a market through a technology push where new products and services require the company to educate their customers in order to enable a proper use of their products/services. The generic ventures, on the contrary, enter a market through market pull where they exploit potential demands or opportunities/imbalances. These differences implicate venture gestation processes that imply differences also referring to the firms’ strategies for market entry and resource requirement and configuration.