Opportunistic Adaptation in Start - Up Companies -

It has been proposed that a key success factor for entrepreneurial start-up companies in dynamic industries is their capacity to continuously adapt their business opportunistically. However, the concept of opportunistic adaptation is in need of further development and clarification in order to make it possible to empirically test its usefulness, something that this far has been done only to a limited extent. Opportunistic adaptation has primarily been regarded as an entrepreneurial strategy focusing on rapid learning and change in order to adapt to market changes. We argue that two important dimensions left out of this process are the roles played by the resources and capabilities of the firm, and the entrepreneurial vision guiding business development. As entrepreneurs develop new businesses they do not only react on what happens in the existing market but base their actions also on a vision of a desired future state. A tentative theoretical framework combining the dynamic capabilities approach of the resource-based strategy school and the cognitive dimension of the business, conceived as entrepreneurial vision, is developed. In order to explore how the entrepreneurial vision and the firm’s capabilities and resources influence the business development process, we have performed case studies of the business model evolution in 26 start-up companies in the emerging Swedish mobile Internet industry. A number of observations from the studied companies are described and discussed in relation to the theoretical framework. Finally, some important issues derived from the theoretical elaboration and the empirical observations are brought forward. In particular, it is noted that the industry experience of the founding/management team, interaction with customers, and the dependence of external parties are factors that influence the possibilities for a start-up company to succeed in developing a new business.