Market introduction and upscaling of new technology s: Life trajectories of start-ups in contrasting entrepreneurial ecosystem

We investigate the performance of university spin-off firms (USOs) with a focus on market introduction, upscaling and survival. The perspective is that of founding teams and early networks, including balancing of weak founding teams. Building on quantitative groundwork suggesting a negative relation between early founding teams and business performance, a more comprehensive perspective is explored in the current paper. By connecting balancing of weak teams with risk-taking in innovation activity, the interplay of team and networks with innovation suggests four life ‘trajectories’. Derived from contrasting case studies (n=17), we could identify: a) Balanced teams and/or co-creation networks enabling risk-taking in radical innovation; b) No relevant balancing of teams and small risk-taking in services and incremental product innovation; c) Persistently non-balanced teams with high risk-taking followed by failure in radical innovations’ market introduction, and d) Persistently non-balanced teams in incremental innovation with failure in upscaling. Next, several relations could be identified between positive trajectories and type of entrepreneurial ecosystem. Specialization in oil and wind industry tends to be more advantageous in metropolitan coastal ecosystems, specifically with regard to balancing of weak teams through local networks. In non-metropolitan area, there is the risk of too tight relationships in local financial consortia. On the other hand, balancing of teams here may go along with more advanced workplace team learning, which tends to be weaker in metropolitan ecosystems. The paper concludes with implications of the results and future research lines.