Starting-up: relating to a context in motion

The odds that a start-up succeeds are low. The risk of failure during the first three years is estimated at 85 %; statistics show that only a few newly started businesses survive more than a handful of years (Short, McKelvie, Ketchen, & Chandler, 2009). Despite these odds, the number of entrepreneurs who want to start their own business continues to grow, and the interest among policy makers and investors remains. Since such unfavourable statistics persist, despite research on entrepreneurship and the support which start-ups receive, our understanding and knowledge about the process of establishing and developing a new business venture is apparently rather limited or not fully relevant. Following a certain tradition in new venturing studies (Gartner, 1985), in this chapter we use the notion of ‘start-up’ when we refer to the pre-organizational stage, and that of ‘new business venture’ when the enterprise acquires the features of an organized activity system (drawing a clear line is of course arbitrary but this is not really central to our purpose in this chapter).