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- Title
Pivoting Isn't Enough? Managing Strategic Reorientation in New Ventures.
- Authors
McDonald, Rory; Gao, Cheng
- Abstract
New ventures often experience deviations from their plans that oblige them to reorient in pursuit of a better fit between their evolving products and their target customers. Yet, research is largely silent on how managers explain such changes and justify their ventures in the wake of fundamental redirections in strategy. Ventures initially attain legitimacy and amass resources on the strength of aims that audiences find compelling; later, those early claims can complicate course corrections. To shed light on how ventures manage strategic reorientations, we conducted an inductive, comparative case study of ventures in a nascent financial-technology sector. The ventures pursued parallel reorientations and produced comparable end products but diverged conspicuously in managing audiences during transitions. Our process model, inspired by these differences, proposes a sequence of stratagems that may enable entrepreneurs to alter strategy while portraying faithfulness to enduring aims. Our theoretical framework posits that, for ventures, reorientation without penalty may depend on how they anticipate, justify, and stage changes to various audiences.
- Subjects
NEW business enterprises; BUSINESSPEOPLE; AUDIENCES; COMPARATIVE studies
- Publication
Organization Science, 2019, Vol 30, Issue 6, p1289
- ISSN
1047-7039
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1287/orsc.2019.1287