Fuzzy Phases and Plural Paths: Mapping the Temporal Structure of Entrepreneurial Start-Ups

• In Event: 413 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Refereed Roundtable Session. Table 01. Culture and Organizations
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 07. Innovation

Abstract

This paper reports on a data-driven effort to map the temporal and conceptual relationships
among a range of entrepreneurial start-up activities -- developing a business model,
incorporating, registering intellectual property, making first hires, and so on. Although timing
and sequencing advice abounds in the practitioner literature on entrepreneurship, scholarly
research to date has yielded unruly and inconclusive results. So much so, in fact, that many
researchers have questioned whether reliable temporal regularities exist at all. Our results,
however, suggest that such pessimism may be premature. Drawing on data from the Panel Study
of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSEDII), we examine the incidence of 36 key start-up activities,
across a sample of over 960 nascent business firms. We construct multiple indices of temporal
similarity among these 36 activities, including patterns of: co-occurrence, substitutability,
simultaneity, correlation, and sequentiality. We then subject these similarity indices to a
multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis, in order to construct a map of the start-up “activity
space.” Results suggest that this space is spanned by two conceptually-plausible dimensions:
timeline (early versus late), and modality (operational versus constitutive). Moreover, these
underlying dimensions – and the positions of specific start-up activities along these – remain
remarkably consistent across various subsets of otherwise distinct ventures.Although there is almost certainly no single “right” way to launch
an organization, there may nonetheless be consistent, discernible, theorizable regularities in how
new organizations come into being in different contexts.

Authors

• Jessica Pollack Krsticevic, Brown University

• Mark C. Suchman, Brown University