Becky Karp - Strategy & Innovation, Boston University
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"What type of village fosters venture development: how innovators overcome product to market challenges"
Many scholars have examined how entrepreneurial-investor relationships affects venture outcomes. Yet, entrepreneurs often engage with a broader community of stakeholders which include customers, suppliers, competitors, partners and regulators whose influence on a venture's development are under appreciated in the literature. While it may take a village to enable novel innovations to reach the market, attending to diverse sources of external feedback can also fracture entrepreneurs' attention to the competing demands of venture development. Little research examines how entrepreneurs engage with their community of stakeholders while transitioning novel products to viable ventures. How does entrepreneurs' engagement with external stakeholders shape the process of new venture development? With a field study of 28 entrepreneurs in a Digital Health accelerator, we trace how different types of stakeholder engagement shaped innovators' attention to the many aspects of venture development. While 10 entrepreneurs gained market traction by engaging with a diverse community of stakeholders, 18 did not. To explain this difference, we trace the stakeholder type, nature of interaction, and the feedback entrepreneurs' attended to over time. In contrast with the notion that entrepreneurs make progress by decreasing uncertainty, entrepreneurs that leveraged ambiguous feedback strategically were more likely to gain the commitment of external stakeholders and make progress on venture development. Drawing on theories of attention, we contribute a grounded theoretical explanation of how strategic ambiguity can be decretive or accretive to venture development.