Entrepreneurial Marketing in Small Firms: A Comparative Study of Small Software Technology Firms in Central Finland, Wales, UK and Silicon Valley, US

This paper reports on present research of Entrepreneurial Marketing (EM) in small software technology firms (SSTFs) in order to investigate and compare the effects of ecosystems in three different countries and, the effect this has on a firm’s EM orientation and, on business growth. Firms today operate in a business environment characterized by increased risk and decreased ability to forecast while markets are uncertain, are fragmenting and becoming frictionless. Hence, firms interact as competitors, customers, and collaborators in a global, knowledge economy. Such changes have had an effect on marketing (Schindehutte, Morris and Pitt 2008) and reflect the type of marketing practiced in sma…

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Business Model Canvas Should Pay More Attention to the Software Startup Team

Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a tool widely used to describe startup business models. Despite the various business aspects described, BMC pays a little emphasis on team- related factors. The importance of team-related factors in software development has been acknowledged widely in literature. While not as extensively studied, the importance of teams in software startups is also known in both literature and among practitioners. In this paper, we propose potential changes to BMC to have the tool better reflect the importance of the team, especially in a software startup environment. Based on a literature review, we identify various components related to the team, which we then further suppor…

The Berkeley Innovation Index: A Quantitative Approach to Measure, Track and Forecast Innovation Capability Within Individuals and Organizations

Innovation and entrepreneurship are essential processes for human development, market growth, and technological breakthroughs, and it is vital for economic growth. Despite its importance, innovation is inherently difficult to measure and hence it is almost impossible for an individual or organization to know how they can improve their innovation output or claim that they are great at innovation. This paper presents a novel approach to measure and quantify innovation, called the Berkeley Innovation Index (BII). The BII characterizes and measures innovation capability of an individual or an organization. It builds on the hypothesis that innovation performance depends on the people, culture, a…

Co-creating great enablers : The Global Venture Lab exploration in Finland

StartCards — A method for early-stage software startups

Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s) Context: Software startups are important drivers of economy on a global scale, and have become associated with innovation and high growth. However, the overwhelming majority of startups ends in failure. Many of these startup failures ultimately stem from software engineering issues, and requirements engineering (RE) ones in particular. Despite the emphasis placed on the importance of RE activities in the startup context, many startups continue to develop software without a clear market or customer, having never had meaningful contact with their would-be customer. Objective: We develop a method aimed at early-stage startups that is intended to help s…

Strategic network marketing in tehncology SMEs

Abstract This study seeks to explore strategic networks from an entrepreneurial marketing and value creation perspective in the business-to-business (B2B) context to ascertain the value generated by strategic groups of network actors. This area has received little research investigation, despite the importance of network marketing in small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The Strategic Network Marketing Model (SNMM) is generated from the study which presents a typology of six network types, together with their associated value creation opportunities. Both the typology and the focus on opportunities generated by the network types are novel. Qualitative interviews were conducted in 12 soft…

Entrepreneurial marketing: a comparative study

This paper uses a comparative study to explore entrepreneurial marketing orientation in small software technology firms, in relation to firm growth. Entrepreneurial Marketing (EM) acknowledges the interface between entrepreneurship, marketing and innovation and, pursuance of customer value. Researchers acknowledge that firms adopting other strategic orientations combined with a market orientation are more likely to outperform their competitors. Currently, there are few comparative studies of knowledge-intensive technology firms and no comparative cross-country studies, which consider firm growth and orientation from the EM perspective. This paper addresses these issues by using an entrepren…

Performance Estimation of Networked Business Models : Case Study on a Finnish eHealth Service Project

Purpose: The objective of this paper is to propose and demonstrate a framework for estimating performance in a networked business model. Design/methodology/approach: Our approach is design science, utilising action research in studying a case of four independent firms in Health & Wellbeing sector aiming to jointly provide a new service for business and private customers. The duration of the research study is 3 years. Findings: We propose that a balanced set of performance indicators can be defined by paying attention to all main components of the business model, enriched with of network collaboration. The results highlight the importance of measuring all main components of the business …

Shedding Light on Early Stage Academic Entrepreneurship : Finnish University Researchers' View on Key Stakeholder Relations and Their Influence on the Research Commercialization Process

Since the mid-1980s, along with the opening up of the Finnish economy, the pressure to commercialize university research has steadily increased in Finland. This is in line with the growing importance of innovations in an ever-globalizing world in which purely production- cost-based strategies are about to become obsolete. However, in comparison to other Nordic countries and Western European industrial countries, Finnish investments in research have fallen short in their ability to increase high-technology export levels (Kotiranta and Tahvanainen 2018). Moreover, Finnish academia faces challenges in creating university-based economic activity (Nikulainen and Tahvanainen 2013). In order to he…

Bricolage in the marketing efforts of a social enterprise

Purpose The paper aims to understand how resource constraints are addressed in the development of a marketing strategy by a social enterprise. Design/methodology/approach The authors have used an in-depth case study of collaboration between a Finnish university and an Indian social enterprise as the methodology for the research in which the data were collected over a period of two years. The data involve semi-structured interviews, field notes and student reports. Findings The authors propose bricolage as a method of marketing ingenuity in resource-constrained social enterprises. Network bricolage and entrepreneurship education bricolage were identified as two mechanisms adopted to address…

Teknologiapohjaisen palveluinnovaation adaptio : case: Mobiilipankkipalvelut

Adoption of mobile banking in Finland

Banking is an area in which technology has had a fundamental impact on the everyday lives of consumers. This article-based dissertation examines an innovation in the financial services industry, namely mobile banking services. It seeks to determine and explain the factors affecting the adoption of mobile banking services, thus the perspective taken by the dissertation is one that focuses on consumer behaviour patterns. In order to arrive at a theoretical model, it draws on traditional theories of innovation diffusion and adoption, and also on the literature relating to electronic banking and technology-based services. The model was tested with an empirical study. This aimed at conceptualisi…

Impact of COVID-19 on Business Model Innovation at EdTech Startups

Purpose: COVID-19 occurred at the end of 2019 and forced the world to change daily routines. Schools and offices were closed and needed to move to online mode. Educational technology (EdTech) aims to advance the learning results for students, foster individual approaches, and diminish teachers' burnout. The study aims to understand the impact of COVID-19 on business model innovation (BMI) at EdTech startups. Modern scholars show interest in researching firms that have various business models simultaneously. It is still unclear how business model diversification corresponds to its accomplishments. COVID-19 was a rapid and unexpected change. Hence, companies did not have much time to change t…

The Startup Scratch Book – Opening the Black Box of Startup Education

Teaching entrepreneurship and startups is a challenging task. Approaches using real or simulated entrepreneurship as a teaching method are also common in startup education. However, as educators and researchers, we typically only observe the outcomes of the startup journey between weekly lectures and other meetings, whereas the actions taken by the student teams can seldom be observed. This makes the process a black box. All valuable learnings, realizations, and big ideas happen in the students’ minds, and little evidence exists to say what happened during the course. As a result, we are entirely missing out on the most critical elements of the learning process. To remedy this issue, we pro…