Abstract
Despite the remnant promises that sustained technological progress offers to entrepreneurs eager to introduce disruptive technological innovations, we observe that only few of them live up to the expectations. In fact, economic and social policy actors' interest in promoting technology entrepreneurship, contrasts with the limited evidences of successful policies for high-growth companies, and a limited understanding on the factors underlying the transformation of promising technologies into viable organizations, and how they influence the decisions to turn on, tune in with the market, and drop-out or continue with their organizing efforts. Prior entrepreneurship research has kept a focus on using the resource-based view to explore the influence of resources on new venture performance, in particular in situations where a demand already exists, and the entrepreneur takes the role of exploiting an opportunity to capture value as a new entrant. Nevertheless, when studying entrepreneurial activity built upon technology-based opportunities, we find difficulties to explain the venture performance only relying on initial resource combinations. In this sense, we propose to complement the understanding of the phenomenon from the resource-based view with additional perspectives that could help to identify factors that provide further understanding on the emergence of new technology-based firms. Building on the theoretical conceptualization of entrepreneurship as a process, we adopt a mixed-method approach to combine an exploratory qualitative field work with a quantitative research approach. First, we gather insights on the factors and actions that are seen to be influencing the technology entrepreneurship process, from the initial opportunity to the creation of a stable business, focusing in particular on the influence of resources and actions taken by the entrepreneur. Then, we extend our initial theoretical framework on the technology entrepreneurship process to support the qualitative findings and build propositions, these are tested as hypotheses on a larger sample of technology-based firms. Finally, we combine the findings from the qualitative field work with the findings from the hypotheses test. This research results suggest that technological resources have a complex influence on the emergence of technology-based ventures. Using the signaling theory we explain how some resources value goes beyond its direct impact on firm's performance, suggesting that they are also used for their symbolic value and the development of the initial market. In both, qualitative and quantitative results, we observe that technological assets need to be transformed in order to generate value for the potential customers of the new venture. In this type of situations, marketing and human capital theory insights provide an explanation on how experienced entrepreneurs and their effort intensity to build a market presence are observed to positively influence the venture emergence of the new technology-based firm. We contribute to the current understanding of new technology-based firms with the contributions from human capital, marketing and technology commercialization theory. Describing how the orientation of entrepreneur's actions and the early development of market capacities influence on the venture emergence of this type of firms. The results also have implications for entrepreneurs, investors in technology startups, and stakeholders in technology entrepreneurship; as they suggest that further attention should be given to the market actions of the entrepreneurs, regardless of their initial combinations of resources.
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