Search results for " startup"
showing 10 items of 34 documents
The Startup Scratch Book – Opening the Black Box of Startup Education
2021
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…
Team collaboration capabilities as a factor in startup success
2018
[EN] This paper discusses the role of team collaboration as a building block for cultivating capabilities in technology-based startups. This conceptual framework draws on a literature review of innovation and entrepreneurship research to understand the intra-organization collaboration mechanisms among team members in technology-based startups. Introducing the concept of team collaboration capabilities represents a new approach to understanding the interaction conditions that give rise to new capabilities from a venture team as its organizational base. Rapid new capability building represents a competitive advantage in environments characterized by innovative technological change, known as d…
Promoting Employability in Higher Education: A Case Study on Boosting Entrepreneurship Skills
2020
How can higher education increase the employability of university students? We present a case study on an innovative training itinerary aimed to promote the participation of teaching staff to stimulate the creativity of students and enhance their employability skills. Students acquire the entrepreneurship competences by applying the problem-solving methodology to their innovative projects based on sustainable development. The participation in the contest shows a growing importance, with topics ranging from the more technical ones, such as nutrition innovation, science innovation, or sustainability, to the social projects, related to social services, inclusion, or services against gender vio…
Software Startup Practices -- Software Development in Startups through the Lens of the Essence Theory of Software Engineering
2020
Software startups continue to be important drivers of economy globally. As the initial investment required to found a new software company becomes smaller and smaller resulting from technological advances such as cloud technology, increasing numbers of new software startups are born. Typically, the main argument for studying software startups is that they differ from mature software organizations in various ways, thus making the findings of many existing studies not directly applicable to them. How, exactly, software startups really differ from other types of software organizations as an on-going debate. In this paper, we seek to better understand how software startups differ from mature so…
Amidst Uncertainty–or Not? : Decision-Making in Early-Stage Software Startups
2019
It is commonly claimed that the initial stages of any startup business are dominated by continuous, extended uncertainty, in an environment that has even been described as chaotic. Consequently, decisions are made in uncertain circumstances, so making the right decision is crucial to successful business. However, little currently exists in the way of empirical studies into this supposed uncertainty. In this paper, we study decision-making in early-stage software startups by means of a single, in-depth case study. Based on our data, we argue that software startups do not work in a chaotic environment, nor are they characterized by unique uncertainty unlike that experienced by other firms. pe…
The entrepreneurial logic of startup software development : A study of 40 software startups
2021
Context: Software startups are an essential source of innovation and software-intensive products. The need to understand product development in startups and to provide relevant support are highlighted in software research. While state-of-the-art literature reveals how startups develop their software, the reasons why they adopt these activities are underexplored. Objective: This study investigates the tactics behind software engineering (SE) activities by analyzing key engineering events during startup journeys. We explore how entrepreneurial mindsets may be associated with SE knowledge areas and with each startup case. Method: Our theoretical foundation is based on causation and effectuatio…
100+ Metrics for Software Startups : A Multi-Vocal Literature Review
2019
Metrics can be used by businesses to make more objective decisions based on data. Software startups in particular are characterized by the uncertain or even chaotic nature of the contexts in which they operate. Using data in the form of metrics can help software startups to make the right decisions amidst uncertainty and limited resources. However, whereas conventional business metrics and software metrics have been studied in the past, metrics in the spe-cific context of software startup are not widely covered within academic literature. To promote research in this area and to create a starting point for it, we have conducted a multi-vocal literature review focusing on practitioner literat…
Lean Internal Startups for Software Product Innovation in Large Companies: Enablers and Inhibitors
2018
Context: Startups are disrupting traditional markets and replacing well-established actors with their innovative products.To compete in this age of disruption, large and established companies cannot rely on traditional ways of advancement, which focus on cost efficiency, lead time reduction and quality improvement. Corporate management is now looking for possibilities to innovate like startups. Along with it, the awareness and the use of the Lean startup approach have grown rapidly amongst the software startup community and large companies in recent years. Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate how Lean internal startup facilitates software product innovation in large companies.…
Software startup education: gamifying growth hacking
2021
Startups seek to create highly scalable business models. For startups, growth is thus vital. Growth hacking is a marketing strategy advocated by various startup practitioner experts. It focuses on using low cost practices while utilizing existing platforms in creative ways to gain more users for the service. Though topics related to growth hacking such as marketing on a general level have been extensively studied in the past, growth hacking as a practitioner-born topic has not seen much interest among the academia. To both spark interest in growth hacking, and to facilitate teaching growth hacking in the academia, we present two board games intended to serve as an engaging introduction to g…
Business Model Canvas Should Pay More Attention to the Software Startup Team
2020
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…