Mapping the Digital, Innovative Start-up Venture Creation Process

Abstract

There has been much interest in the unicorn companies emerging around the world, the vast amount of capital raised for these digital start-ups, the disruption these ventures have brought to several industries, as well as their global impact. Despite this interest digital start-ups, digital opportunities, and their venture creation process do not have a unified definition, or a unified venture creation model.This paper reports an explorative PhD study of the venture creation process of digital, innovative start-ups. The full thesis is available online [1]. We look at what is missing from entrepreneurial process models, when the context is digital technology, and how early stage digital start-ups carry out the venture creation process. The process starts in the pre-phase of antecedents and ends at the launching and scaling of the venture. The research analysed existing models to propose a novel process for the digital, innovative start-up venture creation, which describes the nature and patterns of the process. The resulting conceptual model was developed based on literature of entrepreneurship, information systems, and innovation management, and has been empirically assessed with a multi-method qualitative research design [1] (not reported here). The contribution to the entrepreneurship theory is a new, illustrative model, of venture creation process of digital, innovative start-up, including the emergent outcomes (e.g. mobile apps, web-based solutions, digital platforms, software solution as SaaS) of the process having a digital artefact(s) in the core.