Start-up Teams Research Articles

Fostering Continuous Value Proposition Innovation through Freelancer Involvement in Software Startups: Insights from Multiple Case Studies

[Context] The software startups could continuously innovate business model value proposition by involving freelancers as a source of innovative ideas (that enhance customer perceived value) and as experts for implementing the innovative ideas (by undertaking software engineering tasks). Startups employ one of three strategies for associating with freelancers i.e., task based (association ends with completion of the outsourced task), panel based (outsourcing task to a panel of freelancers associated with startup), or hybrid. Uncertainties, terminology issues, high technical debt, lack of documentation, lack of systematic decision making processes, lack of resources, lack of brand values, need for the continuous involvement of the freelancer to incorporate continuous validated learnings, merging freelancer perspectives, and deciding the level of their involvement in individual requirement engineering (or value proposition innovation) activities, are the main inhibitors for associations with freelancers. The availability of good freelancers and their long term and continuous commitments are necessary requirements for value proposition innovation. The theory about freelancer association with the software startups is extended by studying the real practices of startups, which successfully involved freelancers for value proposition innovation by capturing innovative ideas and acquiring the freelancer’s skills to implement those ideas. [Objectives] The objective of this paper is to explain the strategies adopted by the software startups to foster value proposition innovation by continuously involving the freelancers and the way they overcome the challenges arising because of the associations. The findings are driven by the study of real practices of startups that proved to be successful in the market by involving freelancers and continuous innovations leading to increased market shares. [Method] This paper performs empirical studies through case studies of three software startups located in Italy, France, and India, which are at the verge of being transforming into big companies, with large market share. The current practices highlighting the successful way of executing freelancing association strategies for value proposition innovation and the way to overcome the arising challenges are reported. The findings are also compared with those of two young startups based in Switzerland and India, to bring useful lessons for the young startups. The case study results are validated by employees from the studied startups (both those who participated in data collection and those who did not). [Results] The results indicate that freelancer involvement during value proposition activities, which is the core business operation, is beneficial to the both freelancers and the startups. Startup teams could reduce the development costs, shorten time to market, and increase customer satisfaction (by providing features addressing real market needs) by correctly involving the freelancers uniformly across value proposition activities. The startups could manage innovation with small teams (compared to human resources in companies) if done jointly with the freelancers, that helps the team members to learn new skills, upgrade their skills, and learn new perspectives about their markets. Business impacts due to freelancer involvement are stronger if the level of freelancer involvement across various value proposition activities is higher compared to their involvement across few activities only. The studied startups are not completely dependent on the freelancers but the freelancer’s perspectives and skills are valued as a rich source of market success. Freelancer involvement is taken as an opportunity to gain access to global market perspectives, which otherwise would be effortful for in-house teams to collect. In addition, they resolve technical debt, are a source of upgrading skills for undertaking future innovation, and help reaching customers for marketing (promoting product and gaining access to the feedbacks). Overall, the value proposition innovation in the studied startups have different levels of involvement of the freelancers but these startups have reported positive impacts on the business in terms of development cost reductions, shorten time to market, and high customer satisfaction (measured on early attainment of product/market fit and fast growth thereafter). The case study results are validated by the startup employees (member checking). The responses collected are analysed using box plots, which shows a higher level of result agreements among the employees.

Fostering product innovations in software startups through freelancer supported requirement engineering

This research paper explores the involvement of freelancers in requirement engineering activities to continuously innovating the value propositions and utilizing their expertise in various requirement engineering tasks. This paper reports the case study conducted with the startups that involve freelancers for the requirement engineering activities. The findings are then compared with the literature to explore the freelancer supported requirement engineering domain. Results indicate that the freelancers could help innovate value proposition by providing different perspectives of the global segments and also expertise in executing requirement engineering activities. The freelancers have varying levels of involvement in requirement engineering activities depending on on startup contexts and is highly challenged by various inhibitors. The inhibitors include difficulty to select freelancers optimally, ensuring their long term association for continuous rework arising because of continuous learnings in the market, building trust, mechanism to integrate their perspective, establishing communication, negotiations and strategic pricings. However, there is a need to optimally establish the freelancer involvement from beginning of the startup life cycle with a promise for long term benefits in exchange for their trustworthy and accurate perspectives, which is harder to get by involving crowds of customers due to resource limitations. Further research is required to investigate how freelancers could represent the samples of globally distributed customer segments as input source of information on one side and on another side become startup team representatives to establish direct interactions with global customer segments.

HUMAN DIMENSION OF START-UP

Abstract. Start-up is a young and very small enterprise which staffing and human relationships are different from the internal environment of larger enterprises. Research has therefore focused on founders/leaders of start-ups and relationships inside start-up teams. The result of the research is the basic personal characteristics of the leading people (age, education, reasons for entering the business and others), the quality of their leadership and the quality of teamwork. Since a start-up is developing vigorously, leadership and teamsmanship are monitored on the base of business idea development and investment cycle. Start-up founders are better leaders than managers, teams are better at handling extraordinary situations than standard operation, quality of leadership is situationally conditioned to a certain extent by start-up development phase. Start-ups contain contradictions with significant asymmetry, which are the expression of their limited strengths and considerable weaknesses. The lack of living and work experiences is substituted by the enthusiasm, the diligence and the sense of teamwork that have their limits, and therefore the solution is to professionalize the start-up in in the later stages of its development. Keywords: start-up, founder, leadership, team, Slovakia. JEL Classification M10, G24 Formulas: 0; fig.: 0; tabl.: 5; bibl.: 31.

Requirements Engineering in Software Startups: A Systematic Mapping Study

Startups have high failure rates due to their inability to attain a sufficient product/market fit, i.e., delivering a solution that best matches the user needs in the market. Requirement engineering is the activity that could help startup teams identify the value proposition that provides high value to the users and continuously innovate it. The objective of the study is to analyse the state of art of the requirement engineering research in the context of startups, as available in the literature. The analysis of the research area highlights the research trends to achieve two things i.e., (a) predict how much support the startups can get from the literature for enhancing their success rates and (b) identify the research gaps to motivate researchers to conduct future research that could be adoptable in startup contexts. Systematic mapping is conducted on studies extracted from the four bibliographic databases (IEEExplore, ACM, Springerlink and ScienceDirect) and studies extracted by using a forward snowballing approach. Individual studies are coded to yield the classification scheme. Formulated schemes and those already available in literature, were populated with information extracted from the abstracts of the studies. The research is mostly focused on generic requirement engineering and product validation activities. The research is conducted mostly as evaluations (empirical studies) with the outcome of providing theory to the research community. Major underlying motivation of the research is to attain the product/market fit. However, research studies focusing on requirement documentation, prioritization and elicitation are losing focus from 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively. The literature lacks the studies that reports research solutions which are validated in laboratory settings or in real contexts, experience reports, opinion papers and philosophical papers. The positive side of the finding is that the number of requirement engineering research studies in a startup context have increased in the past five years. At this instant, unfortunately the literature has limited ability to support startups by providing solutions (for instance, research solutions, evidence to support decision makings, best practices, experiences etc.) that are adoptable in their real context. Uniform focus of the researchers across all sub-activities of requirement engineering is required with effort distributed across different research types that supports startups, not only by providing validated solutions but experience reports, opinions, new conceptual frameworks and empirical evidence that can aid their decision making.

Broadening Entrepreneurial Diversity: Seeing Diverse People, Contexts and Missions

This symposium highlights the importance of gender and diversity in entrepreneurial opportunities and the role that entrepreneurial ventures play in solving social and environmental challenges. By exploring entrepreneurial diversity in terms of people, contexts, and mission – by women and minorities, in higher education, Latin America, through crowdfunded organizations, etc. – the key objective of this symposium is to explore how communication, team diversity, and the practice of sustainable entrepreneurship can be enhanced by gender and diversity considerations. The papers in the symposium broaden our understanding of factors that have come to shape the practice of sustainable entrepreneurship and opportunities for new venture creation to generate social impact. New Venture Start-up Teams: Economic Sustainability, Survivability, and Diversity Presenter: Dawn DeTienne; Colorado State U. Presenter: Troy Victor Mumford; Colorado State U. Presenter: M. Travis Maynard; Colorado State U. The Battle of the Sexes: An Empirical Investigation of Founder Gender Effects in Environmental Eship Presenter: Siddharth Vedula; Babson College Presenter: Sanwar A. Sunny; U. of Baltimore Complements or substitutes? An Organizational learning perspective on female mindset diffusion Presenter: Lilach Trabelsi; U. of Geneva Presenter: Maurizio Zollo; Imperial College Business School Presenter: Mario Daniele Amore; Bocconi U. Presenter: Paola Profeta; Bocconi U. Women and Responsible Entrepreneurship, Evidence from B Corporations in Latin America Presenter: Jorge Davalos; U. del Pacífico Presenter: Maria Priale; U. del Pacífico Presenter: Bryan Daza; U. del Pacifico Presenter: Frances Ninahuanca; U. del Pacifico Institutional Constraints in the Informal Economy: Decision to Register in an Informal Market Presenter: Arielle Newman; U. of Southern Mississippi Mirror vs. Mold: Do University Websites Create Bias in Male-dominated Majors? Presenter: Rosanna Garcia; U. of Denver Presenter: Dan Baack; Ball State U. Developing Sustainability Learning at Higher Education Institutions Presenter: Beatriz Rivera; U. of Puerto Rico Presenter: Sylvia Lopez-Palau; U. of Puerto Rico The Climate Change Entrepreneur: Realizing Imaginary Futures Presenter: Kathi Kaesehage; U. of Edinburgh Presenter: Richard T. Harrison; U. of Edinburgh

The Effectuation Dynamics: The Identification-Cognition-Empowerment Perspective

This paper investigates effectuation dynamics, the key different decision-making logics, under the uncertainty on starting new ventures are hybrid by both of causal and effectual reasoning. Many entrepreneurial teams adjust their cognitive styles based on the different challenges they face during the new venture life cycle. Due to the high uncertainty (short life cycle and high competition) of app economy, we choose the new venture firms are in app business and also adopted for a given app affects app performance as measured by the database of apps. Using data from 71 in-depth interviews with 28 executive members, we recorded 179 key decisions chronologically and examined the pattern of decision-making processes. Drawing on the identity-cognition-empowerment perspective, our examination supported the effectuation dynamics, as constructed from entrepreneurs' and industry social exchange mechanisms with effectuation principles and explored how the transitions between the two decision-making processes impact start-up teams. We show how new venture firms empower structurally embedding their transactions, negotiating and financing capabilities, which enable firms to use social mechanisms for adapting, coordination and safeguarding. Our observations also suggest an evolving intelligence on strategic decision-making, demonstrating how effectuation and causation logics are combined, and how entrepreneurs emphasis by integrating and synthesizing transaction cost economics and social network theory.

Performance of Ethnically Diverse Startup Teams: An Empirical Test

Extant literature suggests that network diversity can generate positive outcomes for startups. We examine the case of ethnic diversity as a driver of network diversity and hypothesize that ethnic diversity increases startup acquisition likelihood. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the positive relationship between ethnic diversity and acquisition likelihood increases for teams with greater professional experience. We find empirical support for our hypotheses using a dataset of startups that participated in the Techstars accelerator program between 2010 and 2018. The implication of this study is that ethnic diversity in startup teams drives acquisition likelihood through the mechanisms of cognitive and network diversity which lead to information processing advantages, but that this effect is present mainly for more experienced teams.

Start-up conflict and hair cortisol

Hair cortisol concentration (HCC) can be a biomarker of long-term exposure to work stress. However, research shows no consistent associations between HCC and self-reported stress. This may be due to stress being treated as a general category, without distinguishing between specific types of sources of stress, and because of a limited use of more elaborate stress assessment techniques involving intensive longitudinal designs. In this study, we analyze the relationship between perceived start-up team conflict over 11 weeks and HCC in 63 start-up team members. The results show that the level of perceived conflict is positively associated to HCC. These results draw attention to the importance of interpersonal conflict as one type of work stressors and raise awareness of its physiological effects over longer time periods in start-up teams.

Impacts of promoting sustainable entrepreneurship in generic business plan competitions

Entrepreneurs and start-ups are key actors in implementing environmental innovation and new approaches in cleaner production. Therefore, the integration of sustainability considerations in early phases of a new venture is important. Insights on how this can be effectively implemented in start-up support systems are scarce and represent a research gap. Business plan competitions (BPCs) constitute an important element in entrepreneurial support systems, and are a powerful force in driving entrepreneurial activity. Up till now, it is unclear whether BPCs can actually influence the sustainability orientation of participating entrepreneurs and the sustainability performance of their ventures. The purpose of this work is to clarify whether the integration of sustainability goals and considerations into generic BPCs has an impact on the business activities of participating entrepreneurs and start-up teams. For our investigation we conducted a survey of the more than 1000 participants in the Business Plan Wettbewerb Berlin Brandenburg, which is the oldest and biggest generic business plan competition in Germany. For the analysis we use a structural equation model and apply the partial-least-squares method. Findings reveal that the promotion of sustainability in generic BPCs have an impact on the integration of sustainability in start-up business activity. Thus, from a sustainability point of view it makes sense to explicitly integrate sustainability into the concrete support offerings of generic BPCs. Our research contributes to cleaner production research by providing new insights on context factors in early (seed and start-up) phases of a new venture.

Improvise to win: the relationship between entrepreneurial improvisation and start-up competitive advantage

In today’s ever-changing environment, entrepreneurial teams must be able to improvise when designing business solutions. Still, the way in which improvisation delivers firms a competitive advantage remains unclear. Drawing on action learning theory, this study empirically examines how entrepreneurial improvisation affects a start-up’s competitive advantage. Accordingly, we develop a moderated mediation model of ambidextrous entrepreneurial learning—a balance between exploratory and exploitative learning—and team reflexivity; and empirically test it on a two-wave survey of 149 Chinese start-up teams in the Yangtze River Delta. Our path analyses indicate that entrepreneurial improvisation may result in the ambidextrous learning of an entrepreneurial team, which in turn leads to a start-up’s competitive advantage. Furthermore, the positive relationship between entrepreneurial improvisation, ambidextrous entrepreneurial learning, and start-up competitive advantage becomes significantly stronger when the entrepreneurial team possesses a higher level of team reflexivity.

Comparison of SVM, RF and SGD Methods for Determination of Programmer's Performance Classification Model in Social Media Activities

The failure of most startups in Indonesia is caused by team performance that is not solid and competent. Programmers are an integral profession in a startup team. The development of social media can be used as a strategic tool for recruiting the best programmer candidates in a company. This strategic tool is in the form of an automatic classification system of social media posting from prospective programmers. The classification results are expected to be able to predict the performance patterns of each candidate with a predicate of good or bad performance. The classification method with the best accuracy needs to be chosen in order to get an effective strategic tool so that a comparison of several methods is needed. This study compares classification methods including the Support Vector Machines (SVM) algorithm, Random Forest (RF) and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The classification results show the percentage of accuracy with k = 10 cross validation for the SVM algorithm reaches 81.3%, RF at 74.4%, and SGD at 80.1% so that the SVM method is chosen as a model of programmer performance classification on social media activities.

Star(tup) wars: decoupling task from relationship conflict

PurposeA strong relation between task and relationship conflict has toxic impact on teams and poses a high-risk factor in startup organizations. The purpose of this study is to investigate the moderating role of conflict behavior and related coping strategies on the relationship between task and relationship conflict in startup teams.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted surveys among 100 Dutch and German startup members (Study 1) and 75 Belgium startup members (Study 2). In Study 3, 75 startup members completed weekly surveys in 11 consecutive weeks.FindingsBoth Study 1 and 2 show that the positive association between task and relationship conflict is buffered by problem-solving conflict behavior while this relationship is amplified by the use of avoiding strategies in startup teams. Similarly, the results of Study 3 show that individual and team-level problem-focused coping over a period of 11 weeks buffers the association between task and relationship conflict during this period, while individual disengagement coping potentiates it.Originality/valueThis study adds to the literature on conflict management and entrepreneurship by studying conflict behavior as a moderator in the association between task and relationship conflict in startup teams. Moreover, it takes a comprehensive perspective by including coping strategies conceptually related to conflict behaviors at both individual and teamlevel, as moderators in this relationship. The results of this study provide practical recommendations for entrepreneurs on how to prevent conflict escalation via conflict-oriented behaviors and more general coping strategies.

Start-Up Teams: A Multidimensional Conceptualization, Integrative Review of Past Research, and Future Research Agenda

Academic interest in start-up teams has grown dramatically over the past 40 years, with researchers from a wide variety of disciplines actively studying the topic. Although this widespread interest...

Belbin team roles in a start-up team

Leadership in start-ups has its specific features, which are connected to a high uncertainty, moving of current boundaries, outstanding adaptability and perseverance of the founder. The main goal of this research paper was to identify the role of founders in successful start-ups. The purpose of this research is to determine whether there are certain common characteristics of successful entrepreneurs- start-up founders. In our analysis, we used the questionnaire- Belbin Full Individual Report. This questionnaire analyses and compares self-evaluation of an examined individual with 360-degree analysis of four members of his team. As a successful start-up we defined a company which fulfilled all of the following conditions: creates a unique scalable product/service, exists on the market 4 to 6 years and is achieving revenues in the amount of the third quartile (Q3) in its industry. To make the analysis comparable, analysed figures are only men. In our research we analysed nine founders and CEOs of start-ups base on a 360-degree evaluation- self-evaluation and evaluation of four members of the team. To view cumulative results, we have used the function boxplot.

Job Satisfaction, Motivation and Performance at Self-Managing Teams

Self-managing teams have occupied the modern organizations. Even though it is still in its commencement, the theory of self-managing teams is developing with fulminant steps towards imposing this philosophy to most of the organizations operating in dynamic environments. Thus, studying these semi-autonomous or entirely independent formations is particularly important in order to follow the global trends of management. In this spirit, this study discusses some human aspects which are influenced by self-managing philosophy, respectively it analyses the relationships between team self-management and job satisfaction, motivation and perceived performance. This is supported theoretically by a bunch of studies which discuss predictive elements for creation of self-managing teams, the outcomes as a result of team self-management and others that discuss both inputs and outcomes. Respondents were surveyed through self-reporting questionnaire, comprising of several instruments tested in previous studies. 55 respondents of 19 entrepreneurial start-up teams have been surveyed. According to the results calculated through SPSS, it is confirmed that team self-management is positively related to job satisfaction and perceived performance of team members. However, from regression and correlation analysis, it appears that there is no stable relationship between team self-management and motivation.

Equity Contracts and Incentive Design in Start-Up Teams

Entrepreneurial teams assign equity positions in their start-ups using a term sheet that details equity splits and the conditions for being granted those splits. The design of equity split agreements has attracted considerable attention in the entrepreneurial community, with no convergence on a single preferred contract form. This paper experimentally examines the effectiveness of different contractual arrangements, focusing in particular on the effects of contract form and contracting timing on founder effort and on the value of the venture. Our results suggest that performance improves with the incentive strength of the contract, but they question the conventional logic that this effect is causal. Instead, we suggest a novel causal sequence. Rather than the contract form being the primitive and the behavior the derived consequence, our results suggest the reverse. The differences in contract performance are driven primarily by the sorting of high contributors into nonequal contracts and of low contributors into equal contracts; that is, equal contracts are bad for team performance not because of their incentive strength but because of the founder types that adopt them. Taken together, these results suggest that both investors and founders should pay as much (or more) attention to personality type as they do to contract form. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

Key Criteria and Competences Defining the Sustainability of Start-Up Teams and Projects in the Incubation and Acceleration Phase

This study investigates and identifies crucial and efficient competencies of start-up founders and new business leaders, together with the identification of crucial support provided by accelerator programs. These competencies are necessary as individuals and businesses increasingly focus on innovations, industry 4.0, and technologies. This requires an innovative set of entrepreneurs´ competencies to move businesses to the next level. The study gathered data by means of a quantitative questionnaire research and interviews conducted among start-up projects in accelerator programs over the past three years (2017–2019). In total, 158 start-ups were surveyed, and 38 successful teams were interviewed during this period. To analyze results, content analysis was used and Pearson’s chi-square test and the association test were employed using descriptive and two-dimensional statistics tools. The results identified key success criteria and competencies of successful start-up teams. These include knowledge of the ecosystem, resource planning and use, an ability to move from the initial stages, awareness of communication methods, and lobbying. Our findings are that key activities leading to the acceleration of projects are raising awareness among the target group, furthering the development of contacts, facilitating more efficient use of resources, and enabling the identification of barriers to the next phase of development and ways to remove them. The results may inspire other researchers to conduct studies under other conditions to further identify and understand these entrepreneurial competencies.

Working Apart, Together: The Challenges of Co-Work

Attracting contingent workers, teleworkers, small start-up teams and the self-employed, co-working spaces have grown from corner coffee shops and internet cafes, to business empires with thousands of members in urban locations. Yet the rise of co-working in the twenty-first century has received only limited attention in CSCW, despite co-workers' copious use of distributed collaborative tools. CSCW has more frequently addressed the challenges of working together, apart - that is, how we might support or otherwise transpose rich collocated interactions into distributed environments. This paper explores the challenges of working alone and apart, yet together, based on observational study and interviews at three large co-working spaces in New York City. Using a sociomaterial approach, we identify and explore core tensions visible in the site between participation in a distributed work team and in a distinct, collocated community, which we label the co-working paradox. This includes local configurations of digital and physical materials that shift locus of participation, that blend work and home, and manage employer visibility. We use these themes to suggest a generative return to certain core concepts in studies of distributed work - namely, common ground, workspaces, and placefulness - to further study and design for the growth of these unique environments.

Product Adaptation During New Industry Emergence: The Role of Start-Up Team Preentry Experience

Although prior literature argues that product adaption is critical to survival in new or dynamic industries, we have very limited information about the antecedents to product adaptation. This paper focuses on start-up top management teams (TMTs) and explores the impact of different types of preentry experience—preentry experience breadth, depth, and type (entrepreneurial and business experience)—on the likelihood that start-ups adapt their products. The hypotheses are tested among the population of U.S. solar photovoltaic start-ups during a period of industry emergence from 1992 to 2007. The analysis suggests that preentry experience breadth and experience in other dynamic settings (entrepreneurial) increases the ability of start-up TMTs to learn quickly about their environment, thereby increasing the likelihood of product adaptation. By contrast, deep preentry experience in the industry, although valuable in many other ways, can lead to narrow learning that decreases the likelihood of adaptation. These results underscore the importance of preentry experience to product adaptation. The results also underscore the role and patterns of product adaptation in firm, industry, and technology evolution.

The Influence of Communication and Task Interdependence between the members of the Startup Team on the Team Effectiveness through the Mediation of Swift Trust

The Influence of Communication and Task Interdependence between the members of the Startup Team on the Team Effectiveness through the Mediation of Swift Trust