Minor in Entrepreneurship: Cases in Entrepreneurship
A summary of the articles and videos covered in Cases in Entrepreneurship (6013B0537Y) at the University of Amsterdam.
Week 1 2
Growth Momentum in the Early Stages of Small Business Start-ups – Le Brasseur, Zanibbi & Zinger (2003) 2
The Lean Start-up Framework: Closing the Academic–Practitioner Divide – Shepherd & Gruber (2020) 3
New Venture Growth: A Review and Extension – Gilbert, McDougall & Audretsch (2006) 4
Introduction to the Market Opportunity Navigator – Marc Gruber & Sharon Tal (2017) 5
The Business Model Canvas – Alex Osterwalder (2015) 6
Week 2 7
Innovation Organisational Capabilities and the Born Global Firm – Knight & Cavusgil (2004) 7
A Quantitative Content Analysis of Characteristics of Rapid Growth Firms & Their Founders – Barringer, Jones & Neubaum (2005) 8
Foundations for Growth – Christensen, Johnson & Rigby (2002) 9
Why We Need to Reform the Start-up Business Model – Melanie Rieback (2019) 10
Week 3 11
The Five Stages of Small Business Growth – Churchill & Lewis (1983) 11
The Strategic Management of High-Growth Firms: A Review and Theoretical Conceptualization – Demir, Wennberg & Mckelvie (2016) 12
Evolution and Revolution as Organisations Grow – Greiner (1998) 13
Week 4 14
BCG Transforming for Growth: An Evidence Based Guide – Reeves, Faeste, Bham & Heje (2020) 14
The Relationship between Innovation and Diversification in the Case of New Ventures: Unidirectional or Bidirectional? – Deligianni,
Voudouris & Lioukas (2014) 15
Entrepreneurial Marketing Strategies During the Growth of International New Ventures Originating in Small and Open Economies –
Hallback & Gabrielsson (2013) 16
Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace – Amy Edmondson (2014) 17
Week 5 18
Explaining Incubators using Firm Analogy – Aanboen (2009) 18
The Role of Accelerator Designing in Mitigating Bounded Rationality in New Ventures – Cohen, Bingham & Hallen (2018) 19
Week 6 20
Paradoxial Leadership to Enable Strategic Agility – Lewis, Andriopoulos & Smith (2014) 20
Development Entrepreneurial Leadership: Role Human Social and Institutional Capital – Leitch, McMullan & Harrison (2011) 21
Leadership in Organizational Knowledge Creation – von Krogh, Nonaka & Rechsteiner (2012) 22
Leadership at the LEGO Group (The LEGO Leadership Playground: Leadership for Everyone) – Shuster & Christiansen (2019) 23
,Minor in Entrepreneurship: Cases in Entrepreneurship 2
Week 1
Growth Momentum in the Early Stages of Small Business Start-ups – Le Brasseur, Zanibbi & Zinger (2003)
• Growth momentum: the rate of growth experienced by an enterprise during its initial years (measured by sales volume)
o Growth momentum manifests itself in the number of key expansion-related activities & the concurrent increase in sales.
These activities, in turn, influence the expansion intentions for the following year.
• Successful expansion breeds high intentions of expansions for the following year.
• In demonstrating its ability to grow, the business becomes oriented towards continued growth.
• According to the cognitive theory of planned behaviour, actions can be predicted by intentions
o Intentions are a cognitive tension between the business vision and current conditions
the owner’s intentions could be a key determinant of organisational success and growth
• Model of initial stages of growth momentum in small business start-ups
o There is a positive relationship between intended and actual expansion
o Our conceptualisation of growth momentum emphasises the breadth of entrepreneurial activities and largely ignores the
issue of effective use of resources.
The assumption here is that entrepreneurs organise
resources based on their personal experience and skill.
o An important background issue: the skills of the owner-manager
In its early stages, the business is highly dependent on
the owner-manager as the main resource and
decision maker
As the firm grows in complexity, it may be necessary
to balance the entrepreneurial approach to decision-
making with a professional management style of
leadership.
To adapt to new competitive pressures and develop
the requisite organisational capabilities, the skill base
of the organisation must extend beyond the owner-
manager’s managerial and/or technical capabilities.
• Pre-Start-up Phase: Hypotheses & Results
o The pre-start-up phase encompasses all activities that are
carried out between the time the founder originally conceived
the business idea and the time that the business was actually
registered.
o H1: the breadth of activities undertaken in the pre-start-up phase will be positively associated with business performance.
some support.
o H2: there will be a positive relationship between the breath of pre-start-up activities and the founder’s expansion
intentions (e.g. launch new products and services, hire additional staff) for the initial years of operation. supported.
• Beyond the Pre-Start-up Phase: Hypotheses & Results
o H3: expansion intentions for a given year will be positively associated with the range of expansion activities carried out in
that same year. not supported.
o H4: the range of expansion activities undertaken will be positively associated with business performance. some support.
o H5: the range of expansion activities carried out in a given year will influence expansion intentions for the following year.
not supported.
o H6: business performance in a given year is positively associated with expansion intentions for the following year.
supported.
Owner-managers will periodically reflect on the firm’s performance in light of their personal vision for the
business and adjust their growth intentions accordingly.
• Summary and Conclusions
o Pre-start-up activities are a catalyst for growth momentum.
o The breadth of activities that the owner-manager engages in during the pre-start-up period appears to provide a solid
platform for future growth.
o Early on, the start-up entrepreneur needs to resist the temptation to become immersed in day-to-day operating issues
and turn his/her attention to building a base of managerial capabilities that will enable the growing firm to adapt to the
demands of the marketplace.
Sustained activity, starting at the pre-start-up phase and extending beyond, is critical to growth in sales
however, high reliance on the entrepreneur’s technical skills (in lieu of the development of needed
management skills) acts as an impediment to growth.
, Minor in Entrepreneurship: Cases in Entrepreneurship 3
The Lean Start-up Framework: Closing the Academic–Practitioner Divide – Shepherd & Gruber (2020)
• Lean start-up is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly
discover if a proposed business model is viable
• The lead start-up framework originated with the work of Blank (2013)
o He proposed that entrepreneurs should adopt an outward-looking learning mindset—that is, they should develop
hypotheses about the key elements of their start-up, get out of the building and test their hypotheses, and then adapt
their initial concepts until they find a viable business model.
o He offered a first set of tools to help entrepreneurs accomplish their search, learning, and validation activities.
• Osterwalder positioned the start-up in a design science framework based on the (natural) scientific method.
o Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) developed the “Business Model Canvas” – a tool that seeks to support entrepreneurs in
designing their business model and in developing and testing hypotheses about the business and its overall profitability
(and, by implication, viability).
A business model is a conceptual tool that contains a set of elements and their relationships and allows
expressing the business logic of a specific firm.
• The next key development stage of the lean start-up framework was proposed by Eric Ries.
o He identified key similarities between the goals outlined in the emerging set of start-up tools and the Toyota Production
System, which had become popularised as a lean manufacturing approach.
customer development + iterative agile techniques = lean start-up
o He argued that the Lean Start-up method allows for constant adjustments with a
steering wheel called the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.
Through this process of steering, we can learn when and if it’s time to
make a sharp turn called a pivot or whether we should persevere along
our current path.
• The most recent addition to the lean start-up framework is Gruber and Tal’s “Market
Opportunity Navigator” (2017).
o The lean start-up tools (customer development, agile engineering, Business
Model Canvas) tell you how to rapidly find product/market fit inside a market,
and how to pivot when your hypotheses are incorrect.
o The MON helps you figure out where to start the search for your new business.
It provides a wide-lens perspective to find different potential market
domains for your innovation, before you zoom in and design the
business model or test your minimal viable products.
• The lean start-up framework has five primary building blocks:
• (a) finding and prioritising market opportunities in start-ups Gruber & Tal
o The market opportunity that a start-up seeks to exploit defines the domain in
which it wants to compete, create value, and achieve viability.
o Often entrepreneurs are too optimistic about the potential of their initially identified target market and have to perform a
challenging “re-start” in an alternative market domain (= more than 70% of all new ventures)
o While the goal of lean learning is to find out how to play as a start-up, entrepreneurs also need a wide-lens perspective
that allows them to perform a distant or global search for where to play.
• (b) designing business models Osterwalder & Pigneur
o The design of a business model presents a “leap of faith” as it requires an entrepreneur to create a set of assumptions
regarding whether a (potential) customer problem can be solved by a product or service that delivers value to customers
and whether value-generating new business can be established.
This is where hypotheses related to venture creation and venture growth can be formulated.
• (c) validated learning (including customer development) Blank
o Entrepreneurs rapidly test hypotheses and refine or substantially change their envisioned business models.
o Validated learning is “the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a start-
up’s present and future prospects” (Ries, 2011).
o In the customer development process, entrepreneurs examine, and test hypotheses related to their market & customers.
o Founders (as all people) tend to engage in confirmatory search (that it often leads to poor decision outcomes)
This bias can be minimised/overcome using the scientific method of hypothesis testing which requires
experimenters to remain sceptical about the veracity of a hypothesis until empirical testing erodes sufficient
doubt so it can be accepted or provides information sufficient to reject it.
• (d) building minimum viable products (MVPs) for hypothesis testing Ries
o An MVP is a “version of the product that enables a full turn of the build-measure-learn loop with a minimum amount of
effort and the least amount of development time” (Ries, 2011).
o Contains only the critical features of an envisioned product and is designed to test a specific hypothesis quickly.
Any features added to an MVP that do not contribute to learning are considered a waste of resources.
• (e) learning whether to persevere with or pivot from the current course of action Ries
o A pivot is a “structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and
engine of growth” (Ries, 2011) The alternative to a pivot is to persevere with the current solution.
A successful pivot will allow a start-up to move closer to or reach a sustainable, repeatable business model that
will allow the venture to grow (Blank & Dorf, 2012).
o The greater the investment of creative energy and other resources into a particular business model for a start-up, the
greater the sunk costs and therefore the more difficult it will be to make the decision to pivot (Ries, 2011).
