Navigating Entrepreneurial Pathways

Discovering a promising possibility is only the beginning. Digital start-ups often face multiple plausible product, technology, and market directions because digital products can be modified, recombined, customized, and adapted for different customers. This flexibility gives start-ups room to experiment and pivot, but they can also make it difficult to know what to change or keep, and when to commit.​  Together, these studies ask: How do start-ups navigate multiple possible paths and converge on viable products, markets, and architectures?

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Papers 

1. Ventures' Pursuit of Product-Market Fit in Nascent Ecosystems: Evidence from Digital Health, Douglas Hannah and Shi-Ying Lim, Organization Science, provisionally accepted [Link]

How do new ventures learn and achieve product–market fit in nascent ecosystems?

Conventional entrepreneurial approaches emphasize low-cost prototypes, rapid validation, iterative improvement, and pivots. Our study shows that this logic can break down when viability depends on interdependent actors whose roles and relationships are themselves still taking shape. We identify two learning pathways: launch–iterate–pivot, which can lead to repeated but unproductive change, and explore–commit–compare, which combines broad ecosystem exploration with deep commitment to selected alpha customers and comparison across distinct product–market pairs. The study develops a different learning logic for pursuing product–market fit in nascent ecosystems.

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2.  Digital Start-ups' Use of External Digital Components: Effects on Time to Early-stage Funding and the Moderation Effect of Employee Hires. Yichen Sun, Shi-Ying Lim, Khim Yong Goh,  Information Systems Research, conditionally accepted [Link]​

How does start-ups' use of product- versus customer-oriented external digital components affect time to early-stage funding?  

Digital start-ups increasingly rely on third-party-provided external digital components (EDCs), such as low-code/no-code tools and development frameworks, to build products and engage customers. However, these EDCs do not all impose the same resource demands when used. Using data from 7,772 digital start-ups, we distinguish between product-oriented EDCs, which typically require greater integration effort, and customer-oriented EDCs, which tend to provide more ready-to-use functionality. Increased use of product-oriented EDCs is associated with longer time to Series A funding, while Increased use of customer-oriented EDCs is associated with shorter time to Series A funding. We also show how employee hires can mitigate or substitute for these resource demands depending on the type of EDC used.

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3. Growing an Engaged Installed Base: Managing Ambidexterity Tensions in Early-stage Software-as-a-Service Development. Shi-Ying Lim & Adrian Yeow, Information Systems Research, 4th round review

How do early-stage DI vendors coordinate exploration and exploitation across product and market domains to grow their installed base while sustaining engagement?

Early-stage SaaS vendors often begin by customizing products for initial users, but scaling requires them to determine which requirements will recur, which product elements can transfer across markets, and where to focus. Following six enterprise digital health SaaS vendors, we show how firms navigate these interdependent product and market choices through an asymmetric ambidexterity path. Three mechanisms—cross-domain counterbalancing, within-domain hedging, and cross-layer scaffolding—allow vendors to preserve exploration where needed while progressively standardizing recurring elements. The study explains how firms move beyond bootstrapping toward a modular architecture and a more focused market for scaling.

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4. How Stretching Digital Templates Constrained Entrepreneurial Agency at an Early-Stage Venture, Shi-Ying Lim and Sirkka Jarvenpaa, MIS Quarterly, 3rd round review

How and why can digital templates constrain entrepreneurs' agency over time?

Digital templates give entrepreneurs a fast way to respond to new customer requirements. But repeated adaptation can also change the set of choices available later. In a three-year longitudinal study, we show how designers stretched existing templates cognitively and materially rather than redesigning the underlying architecture as they marketed their products to new customers. These practices initially expanded the venture’s ability to respond across more than twenty market segments. Over time, however, dependencies accumulated within and across templates until the architecture itself constrained both the functions the venture could support and the actions designers could take. The study reveals how actions that appear to preserve flexibility can progressively restrict future agency.

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5. When prototypes don’t yield useful insights.  Douglas Hannah & Shi-Ying LIm, Harvard Business Review (hbr.org),  2024. [Link]

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Other work in progress

6. Legitimacy Tradeoffs: Use of Low-Code/No-Code Tools and Digital Start-ups' Funding, Yichen Sun, Shi-Ying Lim, Khim Yong Goh, Working paper [Link]​

How is the use of core versus peripheral low-code'/no-code tools associated with start-ups' likelihood of obtaining early-stage funding?  The project examines how investors interpret the legitimacy of start-ups' reliance on low-code'/no-code tools and how those interpretations vary with business novelty and market heat.

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7. Digital Flexibility and Pivots as Drift, Ongoing project

This work examines whether the ease with which digital products can be changed can lead ventures to pivot repeatedly without accumulating enough learning to converge on a viable direction.

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8. Types of Minimality and Learning in Digital Entrepreneurship, Ongoing project

This project examines different meanings of "minimality" in entrepreneurial development and when practices intended to support disciplined experimentation instead become forms of hyper-agility.