Methods
- Establishing strategies for the firm, including growth and survival strategies
- Maintaining the human resources (recruiting and retaining talented employees and executives)
- Ensuring the availability of required materials (e.g. raw resources used in manufacturing, computer chips, etc.)
- Ensuring that the firm has one or more unique competitive advantages
- Ensuring good organizational design, sound governance and organizational coordination
- Congruency with the culture of the society
Market
- Business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) models can be used
- High growth market
- Target customers or markets that are untapped or missed by others
Industry
- Growing industry
- High technology impact on the industry
- High capital intensity
- Small average incumbent firm size
Team
- Large, gender-diverse and racially diverse team with a range of talents, rather than an individual entrepreneur
- Graduate degrees
- Management experience prior to start-up
- Work experience in the start-up industry
- Employed full-time prior to new venture as opposed to unemployed
- Prior entrepreneurial experience
- Full-time involvement in the new venture
- Motivated by a range of goals, not just profit
- Number and diversity of team members' social ties and breadth of their business networks
Company
- Written business plan
- Focus on a unified, connected product line or service line
- Competition based on a dimension other than price (e.g. quality or service)
- Early, frequent intense and well-targeted marketing
- Tight financial controls
- Sufficient start-up and growth capital
- Corporation model, not sole proprietorship
Status
- Wealth can enable an entrepreneur to cover start-up costs and deal with cash flow challenges
- Dominant race, ethnicity or gender in a socially stratified culture
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