Entrepreneurs develop new technology ventures in uncertain conditions with unproven technologies and limited resources. The majority of such ventures fail, yet entrepreneurship is regarded as a national (and regional) engine for economic growth. This thesis aims to examine entrepreneurs’ attitudes to failure in order to reveal insight on how entrepreneurs learn and how they identify subsequent opportunities, and investigate possible regional differences in such attitudes and entrepreneurial responses. There is much literature on entrepreneurial failure but relatively little that is focused on attitudes to failure, the high-technology industry, or international comparisons. This thesis examines how entrepreneurs’ attitudes to failure in early-stage technology companies differ in the USA (Silicon Valley), UK (Cambridge) and Germany (Munich), and implications for entrepreneurial learning and opportunity identification in these regions. Interviews with habitual entrepreneurs explore their experiences of failed ventures, using a methodology from qualitative psychology - Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) - for the gathering and analysis of data to reveal emergent trends. This analysis is then used to compare attitudes to failure within and between each region, and a preliminary conceptual framework is proposed for analyzing future experiences of entrepreneurial failure. Findings from this idiographic study suggest that although each entrepreneur’s experience of and attitudes to failure is unique, there are more commonalities than differences between regions. Furthermore, these findings reveal the importance of the use of language and narrative in the analysis of such accounts. In addition, the results allow reflection on the appropriateness and limitations of methodologies such as IPA for this subject. This thesis contributes to theory by examining ‘effectuation’ as a way to understand these experiences, and discussing the impact of findings in relation to attribution theory, prospect theory and real-options theory. This thesis contributes to practice by augmenting existing knowledge of entrepreneurial failure through the comparative (regional) approach and the industry-specific (high-technology) focus. It may also improve the preparedness of new practitioners and entrepreneurs, with positive implications for future entrepreneurial success.

In the current digital era, social media has become an important element in the business world. Several theoretical studies have addressed the use of social media platforms in business operations. In this study, we tried to understand LinkedIn’s role in entrepreneurs’ effectuation processes by conducting 11 semi-structured interviews with (co-) founders in early stage startups across different industries in Sweden. Our research found that entrepreneurs utilized LinkedIn as one of their available means and used it extensively in their day-to-day business activities. LinkedIn helps entrepreneurs expand their networks and start partnership with people across border. LinkedIn also acts as an important source of information for early stage startups’ founders to be aware of what is happening in the industry and to be in control towards the shifting market. This thesis opens the door for future research to address the connection between social media platforms and entrepreneurs’ effectuation processes. This study can also trigger more entrepreneurs to adopt LinkedIn in their business operations.

In the last decades, the technology in ICT sector has advanced significantly. Rapid improvement of Internet services and virtualization techniques have caused the birth of a handful of computing paradigms, including the cloud computing. There are a number of major global cloud service providers that offers various cloud services to individual and companies. Consequently, there are increasing numbers of companies that are moving to the cloud leading to proliferation of cloud computing market. This thesis explores the impact of cloud computing towards early stage startups in terms of usage, benefit, competitive advantage, and dependency in order to be sustainable in the focus of a specific country: Sweden. Stockholm has become one of the top tech startup scenes in Europe and has given birth to a great deal of startups, some of the internationally recognized ones including Spotify, Klarna, and King while there are other ones that have a potential to catch up with them. In order to give an insight about what the impacts of cloud computing towards the early stage startups, three Stockholm-based early stage startups from 3 different field of business were interviewed. To ensure the anonymity of the startups, the companies are referred to The Healthy Company, a startup that sells healthy food through pop-up bicycle; The Invest Company, a startup that develops mobile application to connect startups and investors; and The Learning Company, a startup that summarizes business books that take 8 hours to finish into just half an hour. Based on the findings of this study, there are several characteristics that are similar in all 3 startups regardless of their field of business.

Managing innovations is a well studied success factor for companies and organizations. This research focuses on the recently established Lean Startup Methodology (LSM) and the obstacles of implementing it in early- and later-stage business-to-business (B2B) Software as as Service (SaaS) startups. The scarcity of academic research around this framework, in contrast to its popularity, motivated the researchers’ aim to provide a better understanding on how it could be adapted to better fit the needs of these companies.Following an interpretivist paradigm, this qualitative research uses a literature review and semi-structured interviews for its purposes. Interviews were conducted with six individuals at four different early- and late-stage startups. The focus was on understanding the realities of working with innovation management and the different approaches at early and later stage startups. Startups face an abundance of ideas regarding what to do next, a hypothesis confirmed with this study. It is the researchers’ belief that the LSM does not provide sufficient tools for organizations to make an idea selection decision without committing too many resources initially. Lastly, the importance of product ownership for an effective innovation management process was validated.In conclusion, we present the need for an updated Lean Startup Methodology with a dedicated selection step to validate an idea early in the process. This contributes to the theory of innovation management and its practical implementation. The identified gap in academic research around frameworks tailored towards these types of organizations provides a good starting point for future research.

Despite the past decade’s increased adoption of scientific methodologies by startups, most still fail to scale into large companies. The paralyzing plethora of advice, theory and models recommended to startups is poorly matched by practical advice on the applicability and implications of actually following the recommendations. In this action-based research I, an IT consultant for twelve years and founder/co-founder of several startups, try out and evaluate the applicability of methodologies for applying scientific management principles to innovation in early-stage startups. In the first part of my research, I use an naive explorative hands-on approach which results in insights into the limited applicability of popular methodologies such as Growth Hacking and The Lean Startup. These limitations are especially pronounced for early-stage startups who are yet to launch a minimum viable product (MVP), as well as those that have trouble to decide which hypotheses are the riskiest. Most actionable insights during this part stemmed from the engagement in various thought-experiments and reflections, and not from external customer feedback. To remedy this, and to thoroughly evaluate the applicability of a pre-launch market assessment method, I engage in market opportunity discovery following the recommendations set forth by Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). This hands-on in-depth approach yielded seemingly high-quality actionable insights with direct implications for the product and marketing strategy of the studied early-stage startup. In the discussion part, I reflect over the applicability of the evaluated methodologies and argue that the main difference between applicable and non-applicable methodologies is whether they are manufacturing-based or needs-based. Finally, I reflect over possible implications and suggest that a startup community wide change of mindset from manufacturing-based methodologies such as The Lean Startup to needs-based methodologies such as Outcome-Driven Innovation will minimize the startup innovation-process variability and increase startup efficiency dramatically on a global scale.