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Abstract: Digital start-ups have become major promoters of jobs, wealth, innovation, and prosperity. Nonetheless, despite their economic importance their concept is still ambiguous because research on the topic is novel and scarce. Therefore, based on an entrepreneurial journey approach we opted to synthesize the accumulated knowledge so far in the field. Using a methodical search protocol, we picked 23 papers and conducted a domain-based review of the structured theme-based kind. Thus, we found three major research streams: enhancing the theory of digital start-ups (3 papers); Lean Start-up Methodology for digital start-ups (7 papers); and growth strategies for digital start-ups (13 papers). However, since the sample of articles is relatively small combined with the notion that entrepreneurship research has lagged sometimes behind practice, we validated our findings with expert interviews. Overall, in this article we were able to define all stages of the digital entrepreneurial journey and distinguish between them.
Keywords: Digital Entrepreneurship; Digital Start-up; Digital Scale-up; Digital Business; Lean Start-up.
1Introduction
Although entrepreneurship has been practiced for centuries, "what exactly is a start-up?" has not been answered academically (Sala, Philbin and Barikzai, 2022). Therefore, definitions, such as Blank's (2010), which is that start-ups are considered a business entity searching for a valid business model (BM), and once it is found are no longer start- ups, derive from practice. Nevertheless, start-ups have become highly important as they have acted as an engine for economic growth (Acs and Szerb, 2007). Moreover, they are frontrunners when it comes to using novel and sophisticated digital technologies (Kim, Kim and Sohn, 2020), yet such technologies have advanced so much in recent years (Jiang and Stylos, 2021) that some previous theories have become outdated (Zhai et al., 2022).
Like start-ups in general, digital start-ups, despite their emergence as a research topic (Zaheer et al., 2019a), lack a common definition, concept, valid examples, and akin strategies (Steininger, Kathryn Brohman and Block, 2022) because related research papers are scarce (Innocenti and Zampi, 2018). Hence, our objectives in this paper, are as follows: a) define digital start-ups, based on an entrepreneurial journey approach; b) define the various growth stages of digital ventures.
2Theoretical Knowledge
2.1 Digital Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is chasing an opportunity that exists beyond resources currently in possession (Stevenson and Gumpert, 1985)....