TY  - JOUR
A1  - Herrmann, Andrea
A1  - Storz, Cornelia
A1  - Held, Lukas
T1  - Whom do nascent ventures search for? Resource scarcity and linkage formation activities during new product development processes
T2  - Small business economics
N2  - External linkages allow nascent ventures to access crucial resources during the process of new product development. Forming external linkages can substantially contribute to a venture’s performance. However, little is known about the paths of external linkage formation, as well as the circumstances that drive the choice to pursue one rather than another path. This gap deserves further investigation, because we do not know whether insights developed for incumbent firms also apply to nascent ventures: To address this gap, we explore a novel dataset of 370 venture creation processes. Using sequence analyses based on optimal matching techniques and cluster analyses, we reveal that nascent ventures pursue one of overall four distinct paths of linkage formation activities during new product development. Contrary to the findings of the strategy literature, we find that if nascent ventures engage in external linkages at all, they do not combine exploration- and exploitation-oriented linkages but form either exploration- or exploitation-oriented linkages. Additional regression analyses highlight the circumstances that lead nascent ventures to pursue one rather than the other pathways. Taken together, our analyses point out that resource scarcity constitutes an important factor shaping the linkage formation activities of nascent ventures. Accordingly, we show that nascent ventures tend not to optimize by adding complementary knowledge to the firm’s knowledge base but rather to extend the existing knowledge base—a strategy which we call bricolage.
KW  - Nascent ventures
KW  - Linkages
KW  - New product development processes
KW  - Research and market linkages
KW  - Sequence analyses
KW  - Optimal matching techniques
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/80749
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-807498
SN  - 1573-0913
N1  - Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 649378.
VL  - 58
IS  - 1
SP  - 475
EP  - 496
PB  - Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
CY  - Dordrecht [u.a.]
ER  -