Content area
Full Text
Abstract: This paper argues that manufacturing start-ups are shaped by the competencies of the founder(s) more than discovered needs in the market. Current tailwinds of entrepreneurship suggest focusing on value proposition opportunities as the main prerequisite for a successful endeavour. Contrasting this, our analysis of the largest Danish manufacturing companies and their inventive steps for growth shows that these companies were most dominantly shaped by the founder's competencies. These competencies were blended with opportunities in society or other opportunities which was the basis for the creation of the enterprise. Thus, and maybe even more important, our analysis also shows that it is almost always the second (or third) blend that led to the growth of the companies. Findings are based on scrutinizing the start-up trails of 32 Danish manufacturing companies selected from the 100 largest companies in Denmark. The companies were analysed from an innovation perspective to describe the beginning, growth and as it only cover existing companies survival. Despite the fact that all companies in the analysis have a considerable age/size, we will argue that the learning from their creation and development contributes with a valuable and somewhat contradictory supplement to the contemporary dominant opportunity-focused understanding of the emergence of start-up then looking at science-/technology-based (often originated from universities), and deeply rooted experience-based entrepreneurship. Thus, we conclude based on the analysis, that competencies were the driving force in shaping the start-ups and that growing the companies most often required more blends with the involvement of more important aspects such as blind-spot in the vertical chain.
Keywords: High tech start-up; competence-based start-up; opportunities; blending theory; conceptual integration, manufacturing industry; reflective analysis; vertical innovation, entrepreneurship implications.
1 Existing guidance to (prospective) entrepreneurs' start and growth?
We will begin by introducing some current trends in the guidance of prospective entrepreneurs as well as some bits of theories underpinning our analysis and proposals in this paper.
During the recent decade, the thinking about innovation and start-up processes has been dominated by concepts such as agile, lean start-up, design thinking and business modelling. No doubt, these influential streams of thinking have made an enormously valuable contribution to the practice and applied theories of how startups and innovation processes emerge and unfold. It is, however, suggested here that in...