Does Support Predictive of Start-Up Success?

Abstract

This paper aims to answer this question “Does support necessarily predictive of the success of a start-up?” This paper conceptualizes support into four key dimensions: finance, soft, technology, and market-related. This paper conducts a qualitative approach based on the practical experiences of the CEOs of SMEs. An in-depth interview with 20 successful SMEs CEOs who have run their businesses for more than five years in Malaysia was carried out. The CEOs were being asked about the success of their start-up and how support (finance, soft, technology, and market-related support) helped in their start-up success. This paper provides evidence that i) support matters to start-up success, ii) finance-related support is the critical resources for start-up growth and survival. Finance-related support can provide particular interventions that effectively protect start-up. It acts as a buffer, allows the start-up to engage in developmental activities without having to confront directly to the potential threats; iii) soft-related support is increasingly important to better performance of start-up, and iv) start-up have had low accessibility to technology and market-related support due to lack of expertise and knowledge. The research on start-up is still in the infancy stage. This paper provides insights that support can potentially increase or decrease the success rate among start-up, and these effects are contingent on the type of support or resources received by the start-up. This paper also suggests that there is a need that attends to mechanism and conditions by which support is likely to alter the start-up success rate.