Does innovativeness reduce startup survival rates?

Ari Hyytinen, Mika Pajarinen, Petri Rouvinen* (Corresponding Author)

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

220 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

There are two competing hypotheses explaining how innovativeness influences the survival of startups: On the one hand, innovativeness is argued to foster survival-enhancing attributes (e.g., market power and cost efficiency) and capabilities (e.g., absorptive capacity). On the other hand, an innovative startup faces (and bears the associated risks of) liabilities of newness and smallness that exceed those of its non-innovative counterparts. The available empirical literature addressing this theoretical tension mostly supports the former hypothesis; we suggest that this finding is, in part, driven by the common practice of employing an ex post measure that already embodies a degree of success in innovativeness. We use an ex ante measure and find that a startup's innovativeness is negatively associated with its subsequent survival. We also find that entrepreneurs' greater appetite for risk magnifies this negative association. These findings imply that pursuing innovations is not necessarily associated with survival during the early stages of firm development and entails a more complicated start-up process.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)564-581
Number of pages18
JournalJournal of Business Venturing
Volume30
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jul 2015
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Funding

This paper has been written in the context of the Finnish Innovative Entrepreneurship project (FinnEntre) of VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland. The authors wish to acknowledge the kind support of Tekes , the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation in Finland (grant number 702/31/09 ). The authors also wish to thank the stakeholders of the FinnEntre project as well as the participants of its final seminar (held on 6 May 2013 at Aalto Startup Sauna in Espoo, Finland) for comments and suggestions.

Keywords

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Innovativeness
  • Startups
  • Survival

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