Exploring the Determinants for Start-up Success

Start-ups face several challenges throughout in their attempts to position themselves as goods or services providers. In fact, they can fail at different growth stages. Particularly, they terminate operations before their value propositions advance to solidified business models. Common causes of this retirement include lack of adequate market research, founder/management mismatch, lackluster competitiveness and innovation, cash and resource constraints, and poor customer discovery that prevents startups from pinpointing a considerable customer needs to address.
The main objective of this research is twofold. First, it seeks to analyze the main determinants for start-up success at the different growth stages they face. More specifically: 1) Idea generation, engaging with startups and startup support organizations to learn what pains they’re observing at the startup ideation stage, 2) Technology solution to specific needs, which technology solutions they’re using to address the ideation pains, 3) Interaction with users and testing of hypothesis and experimentation. Second, this research seeks to test the response from start-ups to a technology solution that guides them through the aforementioned steps. In this research we will follow a qualitative methodology that borrows some strategies from design thinking for data collection and data analysis.

Faculty Supervisor:

Claudia Fuentes

Student:

Nikhil Punjabi;Robert Owusu Afari

Partner:

HeadStart

Discipline:

Other

Sector:

Real estate and rental and leasing

University:

Saint Mary's University