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Why Start-ups Fail

Tom Eisenmann

If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why.

Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of founders and investors and scores of accounts of entrepreneurial setbacks, his findings buck the conventional wisdom that the cause of start-up failure is either the founding team or the business idea. The author found six patterns that doomed ventures. Two were especially common:

Bad bedfellows.

Other parties besides the founders—like employees, strategic partners, and investors—can play a major role in a firm’s demise. Quincy Apparel, for instance, was undone by weak support from its investors and factory partners and inflexible employees.

False starts.

Many overlook a crucial step in the lean start-up process: researching customer needs before testing products. Like Triangulate, an online dating start-up, they keep rushing to launch fully functional offerings that don’t fit any market needs.

The good news is, firms can avoid that pitfall by rigorously defining the problem they want to solve, getting one-on-one feedback from potential customers, and validating concepts with real customers in real-world settings.

It’s not always the horse or the jockey.

Idea in Brief

The light bulb.

Most start-ups don’t succeed. A foremost expert on entrepreneurship realized he didn’t understand why.

The Autopsy

An examination of start-up failures revealed two common mistakes by founders: failing to engage the right stakeholders, and rushing into an opportunity without testing the waters first.

Founders should take conventional entrepreneurial advice with a grain of salt, because it often backfires. They also should find the right investors and management team and avoid giving short shrift to customer interviews and research.

Most start-ups don’t succeed: More than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors. But why do so many end disappointingly? That question hit me with full force several years ago when I realized I couldn’t answer it.

Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, the Peter O. Crisp Faculty Chair of the Harvard Innovation Labs, and the author of Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021).

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, small business start‐ups: success factors and support implications.

International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research

ISSN : 1355-2554

Article publication date: 1 December 1998

This empirical study investigates the characteristics of a cohort of 166 small businesses which were set up during a period of recession by founders, all of whom had experienced a period of unemployment prior to start‐up. These new ventures were appraised and supported by their local Training & Enterprise Council (TEC) prior to start‐up and in their formative months. This paper analyses the appropriateness and success of support services in the light of an empirical investigation of the factors which appear to impact on survival/failure and growth prospects of surveyed businesses. Comparisons are made between those businesses which are still trading and those which have ceased trading and between businesses with high and low growth expectations. Factors which are investigated include the founders’ personal background and experience; reasons put forward for start‐up; early problems encountered in running a business; business objectives and expectations.

Small firms
Training and enterprise councils

Watson, K. , Hogarth‐Scott, S. and Wilson, N. (1998), "Small business start‐ups: success factors and support implications", International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research , Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 217-238. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552559810235510

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An Assessment of Competitiveness of Technology-Based Startups in India

Original Research
Published: 17 May 2021
Volume 16 , pages 28–38, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

Krishna Satyanarayana ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9577-0558 ,
Deepak Chandrashekar ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9128-3418 1 &
Bala Subrahmanya Mungila Hillemane ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8745-6147 2

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A Correction to this article was published on 03 August 2021

This article has been updated

This paper examines the role played by the entrepreneurial, firm-specific and external environment-related parameters in impacting the competitiveness of Indian high-tech start-ups, considering start-up survival as a milestone and using survival analysis techniques for the analysis. The study uses primary data collected from 175 Indian high-tech start-ups that are headquartered across the country, using a semi-structured questionnaire and in-depth interviews with the top-level management of the sample firms for analysis. Among the firm-related factors, sales and R&D capabilities of the start-ups have shown to be of paramount importance in influencing the competitiveness of high-tech start-ups. Further, among the external environment-specific attributes, the SDP growth in the region is shown to have significant influence on the competitiveness of high-tech start-ups (borderline significant). This paper makes a key contribution to the existing literature by empirically identifying the key entrepreneur-specific, firm-specific and external environment-specific factors of a firm that influence the competitiveness of high-tech start-ups that are in pre-growth stage in a developing economy. The findings of the study will help start-up owners and policy-makers to make adjustments in their policy-making and strategy to enhance the competitiveness of the technology-based startups operating in India.

Realizing expectations? High-impact entrepreneurship across countries

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

As nations transition into knowledge driven economies, technology-based entrepreneurship has emerged as a credible instrument of job creation, innovation and wealth creation (Kirchhoff and Spencer, 2008 ). Entrepreneurial leaders and their new business models that exploit the changes in the external environment have been the key drivers of this transition. New technologies, inventions and their rate of proliferation into the masses has exponentially accelerated in the past five decades. As a result of this rapid technological change, new entrepreneurial opportunities have emerged, leading to creation of new products, new processes and new ways of servicing people’s needs (Start-up Genome Report, 2012 ). Bailetti ( 2012 ) defined technology entrepreneurship as “an investment in a project that assembles and deploys specialized individuals, heterogeneous scientific and technological knowledge-based assets for the purpose of value creation and capture for a firm”. Numerous technology-based start-ups have surfaced as entrepreneurs across the world seek to operationalize their ideas into new products and services.

India is no exception to this trend. Although still at a very nascent stage, India has emerged as the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world in terms of the number of startups (NASSCOM Start-up Report, 2019 ). India has seen a steady rise in the number of start-ups created over the past decade, with about 9000 technology-based start-ups operational in the country, growing between 12 and 15% year on year. The Indian start-up ecosystem attracted more than 390 active institutional investors who funded deals worth over $4.4 billion in just the first nine months of 2019. There are about 24 active unicorns (startups that have been assessed with a valuation exceeding USD 1 billion) operating out of India as of 2019 and the sector has created about 60,000 direct jobs and about 150,000 indirect jobs (NASSCOM Start-up Report, 2019 ).

At a macro-level, the above developments of technology-based entrepreneurship appear to be very promising. However, it is to be noted that failure rate among the technology-based start-ups is very high, and most technology-based start-ups do not see the light of the day beyond the first couple of years of operations (Certo, 2003 ; Stinchcombe, 1965 ). Ajitabh and Momaya ( 2004 ) noted that survival and success of businesses in the twenty-first century increasingly depend on their competitiveness. Prior research has observed that tech-start-ups need to deal with a lot of uncertainty across many different dimensions in their early days. Therefore, it is appropriate to assume that all the contributions that are attributed to the technology-based start-up sector emanate from those few start-ups who are able to navigate through the multiple challenges in their initial years of operation, survive and emerge successful (Bala Subrahmanya, 2017 ; Krishna, 2019 ).

The above observation brings to fore the importance of competitiveness in influencing the survival and success of technology-based start-ups. The competitiveness of a firm refers to its capacity to viably compete in a given market, leading to an increase of the firm’s market share, and subsequently make an entry into operations at international markets by way of exports, resulting in the achievement of sustainable and long-term growth and profitability (Cetindamar and Kilitcioglu, 2013 ). Wu et al. ( 2008 ) described firm-level competitiveness as the ability of the firm to optimally deploy and mobilize its assets and capabilities to derive competitive advantage in the market. The onset of COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath resulting in nations increasingly looking to reduce external country reliance in strategic areas (Koleson, 2020 ; Viola, 2020 ) also increase the onus on how technology-based startups can help increase India’s competitiveness.

A review of extant literature indicates very little empirical research has been done to examine this phenomenon. This study aims to address this gap. By considering start-up survival as a milestone of achievement of a minimum threshold level of competitiveness, this study is conducted to identify the key factors (entrepreneur or founder-specific, firm-specific and external entrepreneurial environment-related) that inhibit or accelerate the competitiveness of technology-based start-ups operating in India.

Literature Review

Competitiveness is reviewed in prior literature as a multidimensional construct, and is generally explored as an output measure in the context of technology-based start-ups (Ajitabh and Momaya, 2004 ; Acquaah and Yasai-Ardekani, 2008 ; Singh and Gaur, 2018 . Competitiveness has been studied at three different levels—national, regional or industry and firm level. There is established literature dealing with national competitiveness and annual global competitiveness studies and reports, such as the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) from World Economic Forum (WEF), Yearbook from International Institute for Management Development (IMD), National Competitiveness Report (NCR), from Institute of Professional Studies (IPS) are published once every 1 or 2 years to assess the same (Schwab, 2019 ; IMD, 2020; Momaya, 2019 ). Meyer-Stamer ( 2008 ) defined regional competitiveness as ‘the ability of a locality or region to generate high and rising incomes and improve livelihoods of the people living there’. Momaya ( 2001 ) described the key tenets of industrial competitiveness using the Assets, Processes and Performance model and in the process explained how certain industries contributed significantly to the competitiveness of their respective countries.

In the context of technology-based start-ups, the firm-level competitiveness has been explained as being influenced by the three dimensions namely, entrepreneurial or founder-specific, firm-specific and external entrepreneurial environment (ecosystem) related factors (Wiklund et al., 2009 ; Cader and Leatherman, 2011 ). It is therefore pertinent to examine the micro factors related to the above dimensions and comprehend the factors that influence technology-based start-ups’ competitiveness. Entrepreneurship research in its early years focused heavily on using the behavioral aspects and characteristics of the entrepreneur for studying any kind of output measures of firms, such as performance, competitiveness among others (Brockhaus, 1982 ; McClelland, 1961 ; Ronstadt, 1988 ; Storey, 1982 ). Later on, Brüderl et al. ( 1992 ) observed that the education background and credentials of the lead entrepreneur, the general and industry-specific work experience of the founders of technology-based start-ups greatly enhanced the survival of the start-ups. However, over the recent years, factors, such as prior start-up experience (Politis, 2008 ) and entrepreneurial orientation of entrepreneur (Caliendo and Kritikos, 2010 ; Wiklund et al, 2019 ), have garnered much attention. The entrepreneur’s age (Furdas and Kohn, 2011 ) has been discussed as another key factor influencing the competitiveness of technology-based start-ups.

As regards the firm-related factors influencing competitiveness of technology-based startups, Kim et al. ( 2006 ) and Criaco et al. ( 2014 ) described the benefits of human resources as being the enabler for the start-ups to address and mitigate the challenges related to funding (because highly educated entrepreneurs can relatively easily raise funds for their new venture), marketing (skilled founders can recognize the market needs better than their counterparts and therefore can create a market niche), formation of a close-knit network (on account of their higher social standing accrued due to their educational pedigree). There is unanimity in the prior literature regarding R&D investments and R&D capabilities influencing the technology-based start-up lifecycle and competitiveness (Adler et al., 2019 ; Cefis and Marsili, 2006 ).

Lloyd-Ellis and Bernhardt ( 2000 ) noted that many a times founders would complain about lack of availability and access to funding or finance mostly to cover up for their inadequacies in the technical and managerial functions of their firms. Estrin et al. ( 2006 ) and Giraudo et al., ( 2019 ) observed that financial constraints are not to be viewed as a barrier for achieving competitiveness, particularly from start-ups at their inception and survival stage. They noted that financial support was more critical to technology-based start-ups at the time of scaling up of their businesses as against in the start-up creation or survival of newly established firms.

From a perspective of external environment factors influencing competitiveness of technology-based startups, Millan et al. ( 2012 ) noted the role of government actions in ensuring the equilibrium of choice of occupation among the workforce. Cader and Leatherman ( 2011 ) deduced that sector-specific policies and conditions are more favourable to encourage survival of the technology-based firm, whereas agglomeration economies hinder the survival chances of these firms. Audretsch and Lehmann ( 2004 ) established that funding and availability of venture capital as another relevant aspect in impacting the technology-based start-up competitiveness in the pre-growth stages.

In summary, the above facets of literature review bring to fore the contribution of entrepreneur-specific, internal firm-related factors that influence the competitiveness of technology-based start-ups. Furthermore, the review indicates that certain external environment factors influence the firm-level competitiveness. Each of the above studies reviewed in the study examine the influence of individual factors on the competitiveness. It is well established that competitiveness is a multi-dimensional construct and individual factors alone cannot completely explain in entirety the phenomenon of firm-level competitiveness. Therefore, this study tries to address this gap by leveraging an integrative conceptual framework to examine firm-level competitiveness in the context of technology-based start-ups, considering start-up survival as a milestone for analysis of competitiveness.

There is growing evidence on the importance of technology-based start-ups in driving the productivity and competitiveness around the world (WEF Global Competitiveness Report, 2019). While there are some studies in examining the competitiveness of technology-based start-ups in other emerging countries (Mesquita et al., 2007 ; Acquaah et al., 2008), there is a scarcity of studies in the Indian context. India now ranks third across the globe in the number of start-ups—and therefore the lack of empirical investigation in this region deprives cross-country comparisons and hinders development of new knowledge which could benefit similar economies as India. It is for the above reason the present study assumes importance.

Two models of firm-level competitiveness have influenced the development of the conceptual framework required for the present study. Cetindamar and Kilitcioglu ( 2013 ) proposed a model of three pillars based on resource-based theory to assess firm-level competitiveness. The first pillar contained four outcome-based indicators—growth of the firm, export performance, value added and profit, and customer centricity and societal value generated. The second pillar contained input metrics (in Resource Based View (RBV) terminology) that represents the firm-specific factors, namely human resources, technology, innovation and design capabilities and financial resources. The third pillar accounted for the managerial processes and capabilities—largely a proxy for entrepreneurship and leadership characters exhibited by the senior leadership team and founders or co-founders.

Chikan ( 2008 ) proposed a generalized model to interlink and connect the national and firm competitiveness. At the national level, the output goal of the model was to increase the welfare of the citizens, while at the firm level, the output goal was to increase the productivity of firms involved in the ecosystem. Macro-level entities and factors, such as public institutions, government, macroeconomic policy and social norms, were depicted to work closely with firm-specific aspects, such as firm strategy, factor inputs, firm capabilities among others, to achieve the firm-level goal of achieving customer satisfaction with profits. The conceptual framework for the study was derived building on both of these models from the literature review.

Conceptual Framework

The conceptual framework used for the analysis of the data for the study is depicted in Fig. 1 .

Conceptual Framework depicting Competitiveness of Technology-based Start-ups during their pre-growth stages

The conceptual framework captures the entrepreneur-specific capabilities (individual factors), the firm-based resources and the external environment-related factors impact the technology-based start-ups competitiveness. For the entrepreneur-specific capabilities, aspects, such as entrepreneur’s age, founders’ education, entrepreneur’s prior start-up and work experience, are considered for the analysis of this study. The financial capital or resources of the firm, the R&D and sales capabilities or resources of the firm are leveraged to characterize the firm-specific factors in this study. The State Domestic Product (SDP) of the region, the number of Venture Capital (VC) deals and the presence of VCs and angel investors in the region are considered as representatives of the external environment-related factors for the purposes of analysis of this study.

Research Design

This study is based out of India from the perspective of geography and regional context. Data from technology-based start-ups that are operating in the software products or services in the information technology sector are considered for the study. This implies that technology-based start-up firms including software engineering start-ups that deal with DevOps and business operations facilitation start-ups that have an established office including headquarters in India, and that have R&D investments in India (including start-up firms that have global offices) are also considered. Further, we restrict our study to cover start-ups that started operations after the year 2005. This restriction allows us to get a good spread of start-ups that initiated operations for a reasonable period of time.

Description of Variables and Measures

The dependent variable, independent variables and control variables used for the statistical analysis are tabulated in Table 1 .

Data Description and Methods of Data Collection and Analysis

The study uses data collected from 175 Indian technology-based start-ups that are headquartered within the country for the analysis. Survival analysis (Aalen et al., 2008 ) of the data is performed using Cox proportional hazards model (Cox, 1972 ) to deduce the factors that impact the survival of the start-up and the degree to which they influence the competitiveness of the start-up. To collect data from the target audience, a questionnaire was used as the research instrument for this study. The collected data were homogenized to enable assessment across the data points. Secondary data collection was used to collect external environment-specific factors for each of the start-up in our sample.

As there is no solitary repository or database of technology-based startups in the areas chosen for the study, an aggregation of different credible data sources related to technology-based startups was made to create a master list of start-ups operating in this sector. Sources such as Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT) and National Association for Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), which are the two most credible industry associations were contacted for identification of the total start-up population. Further, many government-funded incubators and corporate accelerators operating in the country were also contacted with a request to share the list of start-up firms in the country. After the aggregation and removal of redundant entries, a sanitized accurate list of start-ups was created. The authors personally administered the questionnaire in person or collected data over telephone to all the consenting founders.

To validate that the data collected from founders were representative of the population, the demographic distribution of start-ups data from the Government of India promoted Start-up India web portal ( www.startupindia.gov.in ), which is considered as a formal source of information on Indian start-ups. The comparisons were made across multiple dimensions, such as age of the technology-based start-up, distribution of start-ups with respect to their location of operations, background of the founders, in terms of their education, their start-up and industry experience among others. The results of the comparison of the start-up data from the government web portal with our data revealed that our sample was representative of the population.

Most of the data used in our study are collected using our research instrument—the questionnaire. The secondary data are collected primarily to obtain the entrepreneur profile. This information is obtained from public and professional websites, such as LinkedIn, Angel List, Facebook and similar websites. We resorted to secondary data collection for the entrepreneur profile, so that we could optimize the time during our interview to focus on the core objectives of the study.

Characteristics of the Data

A preliminary analysis on the data collected reveals that the start-ups in the sample have been operating between 6 and 69 months of time since inception. About 49% of the technology-based start-ups reported that they had achieved the milestone of survival (found their product market fit), while the remaining 51% start-ups reported that they were yet to achieve this milestone. About 90% of entrepreneurs conveyed that they had at least 1 year’s paid or industry experience prior to starting their new ventures. Further, about 63% founders indicated that they had stints in other start-ups either as founders or as employees prior to starting on their own. The range of the entrepreneurs’ age at the time of inception of the start-up firm in the sample varied from 17 to 54 years. As regards entrepreneurs’ education, about 35% of them possessed a non-engineering degree, 53% of sample had obtained an engineering bachelors’ degree and the remaining 12% had masters’ degree or higher academic or educational qualification at the time of starting up their venture.

From a firm-specific perspective, 37% of start-ups reported as not hiring any external personnel for their sales related activities, 31.5% of start-ups reported the presence of sales personnel, but with no revenues as on date of data collection, and the remainder of 31.5% indicated as generating revenue through these sales personnel. In terms of R&D capabilities of start-ups, about 18% of them reported as not hiring any external personnel for their R&D, about 66% of start-ups indicated that they had hired external personnel to pursue R&D activities, and the remaining 16% of start-ups reported as having developed a customer demonstrable prototype using their R&D personnel. In our sample, about 63% of the start-ups were not externally funded.

Results and Discussion

The statistical analysis of the data was initiated with a visual inspection of estimators of survival probability using non-parametric KM plots. To begin with, the survival probability and cumulative probability of survival of entire sample against time is plotted (Fig. 2 ) to understand the distribution of survival time of the start-ups. From the Fig. 2 , we can infer that after incorporation of a start-up, as time elapses, the probability of survival begins to decrease. For example, from the data in our sample a start-up has about 99% probability of survival if it is formally incorporated only in the past six months. However, if a start-up has been incorporated since four years (48 months) the probability of survival of such start-up reduces to about 50%.

Survival probability plots of start-ups

As a next step, to arrive at the right model to analyze the objectives of our study, we tried the tests of proportionality on the Cox proportional hazards model. The diagnostic results of the application of the Cox model are summarized in Table 2 . The results from Table 2 indicate that the proportionality assumption for all the independent variables does hold. The high p values for all the independent variables used in the model indicate that they are suited for usage or analysis using the Cox model. The visual evaluation of proportionality was also carried out to ensure that the Cox proportional hazards model was best suited for our analysis.

The test results of our analysis using the overall optimized model is presented in Table 3 . The test results indicate that this model fits better than the null model which indicate that the results from this model could be used for the analysis.

The results from the overall model indicate that among the entrepreneur-related factors, none of the factors has an influence on increasing the likelihood of competitiveness of technology-based start-ups in the pre-growth stages. Among the firm-specific factors, sales and R&D capabilities of the start-ups have shown to be of paramount importance in influencing the probability of survival of technology-based start-ups. Further, among the external entrepreneurial environment attributes, ‘ SDP growth’ in the region is shown to have a major impact on the competitiveness of technology-based start-ups. Following the precedent of Chandrashekar and Bala Subrahmanya ( 2017 ), the impact of the ‘ SDP growth’ attribute which is borderline significant has been discussed in the next section, although in normal circumstances this specific treatment would be avoided. The results of the analysis have important implications in the context of the lifecycle studies of technology-based start-ups and their competitiveness. From a firm-specific resources perspective, the results indicate that it is of paramount importance to have a demonstrable product offering very early in the lifecycle using which feedback could be obtained on aspects that need to be addressed before getting to product market fit. Further, the aspect of lack of revenue early on for the start-up affecting its chances of survival reinforce the findings from past literature. The external environment factors namely the SDP growth (borderline significant, from the results indicated in Table 3 ) indicate the need for a healthy macro-economic and technology-based start-up friendly ecosystem in the region, which in turn would result in enabling a higher survival rate and therefore enhanced level of competitiveness of start-ups in the region.

From these results, we also need to understand and interpret the factors which usually are attributed to influence survival and firm competitiveness—but have not come out as significant in ensuring the same. Notable among them are the entrepreneur-specific factors considered in this study.

As regards education not appearing significant in any of the models, this result can be explained on account of the information that all the founders considered in the analysis had a minimum or basic level education of a degree (graduation). Therefore, the results show that with basic minimum education, these founders are likely to exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. Similar results were noted by Yin et al. ( 2019 ) as well as by Ahn and Kim ( 2019 ) based on their assessment of performance of technology-based start-ups in Korea.

The prior start-up experience or prior industry experience of the entrepreneur has not come out as an important influence on the survival of technology-based start-ups. Prior research noted that for tasks that are well defined, repeated often, and feedback is provided in a timely and correct manner, entrepreneurial judgment can be improved (Hayward et al., 2006 ; Wright, 2001 ). In these conditions of pure uncertainty, where the range of activities and the uncertainty in pursuing every new entrepreneurial activity does not lend itself to repeatability, the aspects of prior firm start-up experience or prior industry work experience may be of little help.

From a firm-specific resources’ perspective, the aspect of funding or capitalization of the start-up does not come out as a significant factor that influences start-up competitiveness at the pre-growth stages. This result also might be viewed as contrary to existing findings, if taken at face value. This result can be explained as follows. Viewed in isolation, funding or capital infusion to a firm at any time of its lifecycle is considered a necessary factor input. In the case of technology-based start-ups, particularly in the IT sector, the nature of the industry structure is such that costs of entry for a new venture is very minimal, since there is no need to invest in any physical assets that invite capital expenditure. The only investment comes by way of intellectual and technical capital—which all of the founders of this sample possess—by way of educational pedigree.

Implications

This study makes two contributions to theory on competitiveness. First, it examines the combined impact of entrepreneurial, firm-specific and external environment-related factors on technology-based start-up competitiveness in a holistic manner. This end-to-end perspective of evaluation using a conceptual framework derived from the RBV and Assets-Processes-Performance (APP) models has enabled the verification on how, certain factors, in the presence of other influencing factors will contribute or hinder competitiveness of technology-based start-ups. Second, this study has attempted to examine firm-level competitiveness of technology-based start-ups which are in the pre-growth stages operating from an emerging economy. In doing so, it has established the applicability of the APP model to evaluate competitiveness of technology-based start-ups. It is well established that research outputs from developed economies cannot be generalized to the context of emerging economies (Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991 ). Hence, this study fills this gap by examination of factors that matter in the context of India.

For the practitioners, the results from this study indicate the need for having a strong R&D capability for technology-based start-ups to increase their probability of survival and enhanced competitiveness. Further, irrespective of whether the start-up focuses on B2B or B2C markets, the results indicate that a lean sales team with the founders or co-founders taking on the role of sales enablement would enhance the chances of start-up survival. Further, the results from our study indicates that from a macro-economic perspective, start-up survival probability increases in regions where there is good economic growth—implying that presence of an addressable market is very important for ensuring technology-based start-up competitiveness.

Limitations and Scope for Future Work

While our study has attempted to add knowledge in the scope defined for the study, a few limitations are to be noted. This study examines the phenomenon of start-up survival as a milestone for examining competitiveness, considering only one sector of the technology-based industry and in one country, and therefore the results are applicable to this limited context. Extending the scope of the study to include a couple more technology-based sectors in the same region, or a cross-country comparison of one particular sector would provide deeper insights that can be broadly applicable. Further, due to the focus on the pre-growth technology-based start-ups, only the C-Assets aspect of the competitiveness has been explored in the study. An evaluation of technology-based start-ups in growth or post-growth stages would enable a much more complete assessment of competitiveness using the entire APP framework. These suggested extensions of scope will lead to creation of new knowledge and insights related to competitiveness of technology-based start-ups.

Key Questions Reflecting Applicability in Real Life

What are the entrepreneur-specific factors that influence the firm-level competitiveness of early-stage start-ups?

What firm-specific factors impact the competitiveness of start-ups?

What are the external environment-related factors that influence the competitiveness of early-stage start-ups?

What frameworks and models can be used to assess competitiveness of start-ups that are in the pre-growth stages?

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge and thank all the anonymous reviewers and the editors, and the Editor-in-Chief Kirankumar S. Momaya in particular for their valuable and detailed feedback which has enabled the authors to significantly improve the quality of the paper.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the IIMB-SJSU International Conference on Transnational Entrepreneurs and International SMEs in Emerging Economies: Drivers and Strategies, organized by Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), India, in collaboration with San José State University (SJSU), California, USA, held at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, India from May 20–22, 2015.

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Satyanarayana, K., Chandrashekar, D. & Mungila Hillemane, B.S. An Assessment of Competitiveness of Technology-Based Startups in India. JGBC 16 , 28–38 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42943-021-00023-x

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Issue Date : June 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s42943-021-00023-x

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ISSUES OCCURING IN BUSINESS START-UPS IN PUNTURIN AND BIGNAY VALENZUELA CITY A Thesis Presented to the faculty of the Senior High School Department In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the strand Accountancy, Business and Management

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How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China

The president has proposed new barriers to electric vehicles, steel and other goods..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Donald Trump upended decades of American policy when he started a trade war with China. Many thought that President Biden would reverse those policies. Instead, he’s stepping them up. Today, my colleague, Jim Tankersley, explains.

It’s Monday, May 13.

Jim, it’s very nice to have you in the studio.

It’s so great to be here, Sabrina. Thank you so much.

So we are going to talk today about something I find very interesting and I know you’ve been following. We’re in the middle of a presidential campaign. You are an economics reporter looking at these two candidates, and you’ve been trying to understand how Trump and Biden are thinking about our number one economic rival, and that is China.

As we know, Trump has been very loud and very clear about his views on China. What about Biden?

Well, no one is going to accuse President Biden of being as loud as former President Trump. But I think he’s actually been fairly clear in a way that might surprise a lot of people about how he sees economic competition with China.

We’re going after China in the wrong way. China is stealing intellectual property. China is conditioning —

And Biden has, kind of surprisingly, sounded a lot, in his own Joe Biden way, like Trump.

They’re not competing. They’re cheating. They’re cheating. And we’ve seen the damage here in America.

He has been very clear that he thinks China is cheating in trade.

The bottom line is I want fair competition with China, not conflict. And we’re in a stronger position to win the economic competition of the 21st century against China or anyone else because we’re investing in America and American workers again. Finally.

And maybe the most surprising thing from a policy perspective is just how much Biden has built on top of the anti-China moves that Trump made and really is the verge of his own sort of trade war with China.

Interesting. So remind us, Jim, what did Trump do when he actually came into office? We, of course, remember Trump really talking about China and banging that drum hard during the campaign, but remind us what he actually did when he came into office.

Yeah, it’s really instructive to start with the campaign, because Trump is talking about China in some very specific ways.

We have a $500 billion deficit, trade deficit, with China. We’re going to turn it around. And we have the cards. Don’t forget —

They’re ripping us off. They’re stealing our jobs.

They’re using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing. So we’re losing our good jobs, so many.

The economic context here is the United States has lost a couple of million jobs in what was called the China shock of the early 2000s. And Trump is tapping into that.

But when the Chinese come in, and they want to make great trade deals — and they make the best trade deals, and not anymore. When I’m there, we turn it around, folks. We turn it around. We have —

And what he’s promising as president is that he’s going to bring those jobs back.

I’ll be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I’ll take them back from China, from Japan.

And not just any jobs, good-paying manufacturing jobs, all of it — clothes, shoes, steel, all of these jobs that have been lost that American workers, particularly in the industrial Midwest, used to do. Trump’s going to bring them back with policy meant to rebalance the trade relationship with China to get a better deal with China.

So he’s saying China is eating our lunch and has been for decades. That’s the reason why factory workers in rural North Carolina don’t have work. It’s those guys. And I’m going to change that.

Right. And he likes to say it’s because our leaders didn’t cut the right deal with them, so I’m going to make a better deal. And to get a better deal, you need leverage. So a year into his presidency, he starts taking steps to amass leverage with China.

And so what does that look like?

Just an hour ago, surrounded by a hand-picked group of steelworkers, President Trump revealed he was not bluffing.

It starts with tariffs. Tariffs are taxes that the government imposes on imports.

Two key global imports into America now face a major new barrier.

Today, I’m defending America’s national security by placing tariffs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum.

And in this case, it’s imports from a lot of different countries, but particularly China.

Let’s take it straight to the White House. The president of the United States announcing new trade tariffs against China. Let’s listen in.

This has been long in the making. You’ve heard —

So Trump starts, in 2018, this series of tariffs that he’s imposing on all sorts of things — washing machines, solar panels, steel, aluminum. I went to Delaware to a lighting store at that time, I remember, where basically everything they sold came from China and was subject to the Trump tariffs, because that’s where lighting was made now.

Interesting.

Hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods now start falling under these Trump tariffs. The Chinese, of course, don’t take this lying down.

China says it is not afraid of a trade war with the US, and it’s fighting back against President Trump with its own tariffs on US goods.

They do their own retaliatory tariffs. Now American exports to China cost more for Chinese consumers. And boom, all of a sudden, we are in the midst of a full-blown trade war between the United States and Beijing.

Right. And that trade war was kind of a shock because for decades, politicians had avoided that kind of policy. It was the consensus of the political class in the United States that there should not be tariffs like that. It should be free trade. And Trump just came in and blew up the consensus.

Yeah. And Sabrina, I may have mentioned this once or 700 times before on this program, but I talk to a lot of economists in my job.

Yeah, it’s weird. I talk to a lot of economists. And in 2018 when this started, there were very, very, very few economists of any political persuasion who thought that imposing all these tariffs were a good idea. Republican economists in particular, this is antithetical to how they think about the world, which is low taxes, free trade. And even Democratic economists who thought they had some problems with the way free trade had been conducted did not think that Trump’s “I’m going to get a better deal” approach was going to work. And so there was a lot of criticism at the time, and a lot of politicians really didn’t like it, a lot of Democrats, many Republicans. And it all added up to just a real, whoa, I don’t think this is going to work.

So that begs the question, did it?

Well, it depends on what you mean by work. Economically, it does not appear to have achieved what Trump wanted. There’s no evidence yet in the best economic research that’s been done on this that enormous amounts of manufacturing jobs came back to the United States because of Trump’s tariffs. There was research, for example, on the tariffs on washing machines. They appear to have helped a couple thousand jobs, manufacturing jobs be created in the United States, but they also raised the price of washing machines for everybody who bought them by enough that each additional job that was created by those tariffs effectively cost consumers, like, $800,000 per job.

There’s like lots of evidence that the sectors Trump was targeting to try to help here, he didn’t. There just wasn’t a lot of employment rebound to the United States. But politically, it really worked. The tariffs were very popular. They had this effect of showing voters in those hollowed-out manufacturing areas that Trump was on their team and that he was fighting for them. Even if they didn’t see the jobs coming back, they felt like he was standing up for them.

So the research suggests this was a savvy political move by Trump. And in the process, it sort of changes the political economic landscape in both parties in the United States.

Right. So Trump made these policies that seemed, for many, many years in the American political system, fringe, isolationist, economically bad, suddenly quite palatable and even desirable to mainstream policymakers.

Yeah. Suddenly getting tough on China is something everyone wants to do across both parties. And so from a political messaging standpoint, being tough on China is now where the mainstream is. But at the same time, there is still big disagreement over whether Trump is getting tough on China in the right way, whether he’s actually being effective at changing the trade relationship with China.

Remember that Trump was imposing these tariffs as a way to get leverage for a better deal with China. Well, he gets a deal of sorts, actually, with the Chinese government, which includes some things about tariffs, and also China agreeing to buy some products from the United States. Trump spins it as this huge win, but nobody else really, including Republicans, acts like Trump has solved the problem that Trump himself has identified. This deal is not enough to make everybody go, well, everything’s great with China now. We can move on to the next thing.

China remains this huge issue. And the question of what is the most effective way to deal with them is still an animating force in politics.

Got it. So politically, huge win, but policy-wise and economically, and fundamentally, the problem of China still very much unresolved.

Absolutely.

So then Biden comes in. What does Biden do? Does he keep the tariffs on?

Biden comes to office, and there remains this real pressure from economists to roll back what they consider to be the ineffective parts of Trump’s trade policy. That includes many of the tariffs. And it’s especially true at a time when almost immediately after Biden takes office, inflation spikes. And so Americans are paying a lot of money for products, and there’s this pressure on Biden, including from inside his administration, to roll back some of the China tariffs to give Americans some relief on prices.

And Biden considers this, but he doesn’t do it. He doesn’t reverse Trump’s tariff policy. In the end, he’s actually building on it.

We’ll be right back.

So Jim, you said that Biden is actually building on Trump’s anti-China policy. What exactly does that look like?

So Biden builds on the Trump China policy in three key ways, but he does it with a really specific goal that I just want you to keep in mind as we talk about all of this, which is that Biden isn’t just trying to beat China on everything. He’s not trying to cut a better deal. Biden is trying to beat China in a specific race to own the clean-energy future.

Clean energy.

Yeah. So keep that in mind, clean energy. And the animating force behind all of the things Biden does with China is that Biden wants to beat China on what he thinks are the jobs of the future, and that’s green technology.

Got it. OK. So what does he do first?

OK. Thing number one — let’s talk about the tariffs. He does not roll them back. And actually, he builds on them. For years, for the most part, he just lets the tariffs be. His administration reviews them. And it’s only now, this week, when his administration is going to actually act on the tariffs. And what they’re going to do is raise some of them. They’re going to raise them on strategic green tech things, like electric vehicles, in order to make them more expensive.

And I think it’s important to know the backdrop here, which is since Biden has taken office, China has started flooding global markets with really low-cost green technologies. Solar panels, electric vehicles are the two really big ones. And Biden’s aides are terrified that those imports are going to wash over the United States and basically wipe out American automakers, solar panel manufacturers, that essentially, if Americans can just buy super-cheap stuff from China, they’re not going to buy it from American factories. Those factories are going to go out of business.

So Biden’s goal of manufacturing jobs in clean energy, China is really threatening that by dumping all these products on the American market.

Exactly. And so what he wants to do is protect those factories with tariffs. And that means increasing the tariffs that Trump put on electric vehicles in hopes that American consumers will find them too expensive to buy.

But doesn’t that go against Biden’s goal of clean energy and things better for the environment? Lots of mass-market electric vehicles into the United States would seem to advance that goal. And here, he’s saying, no, you can’t come in.

Right, because Biden isn’t just trying to reduce emissions at all costs. He wants to reduce emissions while boosting American manufacturing jobs. He doesn’t want China to get a monopoly in these areas. And he’s also, in particular, worried about the politics of lost American manufacturing jobs. So Biden does not want to just let you buy cheaper Chinese technologies, even if that means reducing emissions.

He wants to boost American manufacturing of those things to compete with China, which brings us to our second thing that Biden has done to build on Trump’s China policy, which is that Biden has started to act like the Chinese government in particular areas by showering American manufacturers with subsidies.

I see. So dumping government money into American businesses.

Yes, tax incentives, direct grants. This is a way that China has, in the past decades, built its manufacturing dominance, is with state support for factories. Biden is trying to do that in particular targeted industries, including electric vehicles, solar power, wind power, semiconductors. Biden has passed a bunch of legislation that showers those sectors with incentives and government support in hopes of growing up much faster American industry.

Got it. So basically, Biden is trying to beat China at its own game.

Yeah, he’s essentially using tariffs to build a fortress around American industry so that he can train the troops to fight the clean energy battle with China.

And the troops being American companies.

Yes. It’s like, we’re going to give them protection — protectionist policy — in order to get up to size, get up to strength as an army in this battle for clean energy dominance against the Chinese.

Got it. So he’s trying to build up the fortress. What’s the third thing Biden does? You mentioned three things.

Biden does not want the United States going it alone against China. He’s trying to build an international coalition, wealthy countries and some other emerging countries that are going to take on China and try to stop the Chinese from using their trade playbook to take over all these new emerging industrial markets.

But, Jim, why? What does the US get from bringing our allies into this trade war? Why does the US want that?

Some of this really is about stopping China from gaining access to new markets. It’s like, if you put the low-cost Chinese exports on a boat, and it’s going around the world, looking for a dock to stop and offload the stuff and sell it, Biden wants barriers up at every possible port. And he wants factories in those places that are competing with the Chinese.

And a crucial fact to know here is that the United States and Europe, they are behind China when it comes to clean-energy technology. The Chinese government has invested a lot more than America and Europe in building up its industrial capacity for clean energy. So America and its allies want to deny China dominance of those markets and to build up their own access to them.

And they’re behind, so they’ve got to get going. It’s like they’re in a race, and they’re trailing.

Yeah, it’s an economic race to own these industries, and it’s that global emissions race. They also want to be bringing down fossil-fuel emissions faster than they currently are, and this is their plan.

So I guess, Jim, the question in my mind is, Trump effectively broke the seal, right? He started all of these tariffs. He started this trade war with China. But he did it in this kind of jackhammer, non-targeted way, and it didn’t really work economically. Now Biden is taking it a step further. But the question is, is his effort here going to work?

The answer to whether it’s going to work really depends on what your goals are. And Biden and Trump have very different goals. If Trump wins the White House back, he has made very clear that his goal is to try to rip the United States trade relationship with China even more than he already has. He just wants less trade with China and more stuff of all types made in the United States that used to be made in China. That’s a very difficult goal, but it’s not Biden’s goal.

Biden’s goal is that he wants America to make more stuff in these targeted industries. And there is real skepticism from free-market economists that his industrial policies will work on that, but there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it from a new strain of Democratic economists, in particular, who believe that the only chance Biden has to make that work is by pulling all of these levers, by doing the big subsidies and by putting up the tariffs, that you have to have both the troops training and the wall around them. And if it’s going to work, he has to build on the Trump policies. And so I guess you’re asking, will it work? It may be dependent upon just how far he’s willing to go on the subsidies and the barriers.

There’s a chance of it.

So, Jim, at the highest level, whatever the economic outcome here, it strikes me that these moves by Biden are pretty remarkably different from the policies of the Democratic Party over the decades, really going in the opposite direction. I’m thinking of Bill Clinton and NAFTA in the 1990s. Free trade was the real central mantra of the Democratic Party, really of both parties.

Yeah, and Biden is a real break from Clinton. And Clinton was the one who actually signed the law that really opened up trade with China, and Biden’s a break from that. He’s a break from even President Obama when he was vice president. Biden is doing something different. He’s breaking from that Democratic tradition, and he’s building on what Trump did, but with some throwback elements to it from the Roosevelt administration and the Eisenhower administration. This is this grand American tradition of industrial policy that gave us the space race and the interstate highway system. It’s the idea of using the power of the federal government to build up specific industrial capacities. It was in vogue for a time. It fell out of fashion and was replaced by this idea that the government should get out of the way, and you let the free market drive innovation. And now that industrial policy idea is back in vogue, and Biden is doing it.

So it isn’t just a shift or an evolution. It’s actually a return to big government spending of the ‘30s and the ‘40s and the ‘50s of American industrialism of that era. So what goes around comes around.

Yeah, and it’s a return to that older economic theory with new elements. And it’s in part because of the almost jealousy that American policymakers have of China and the success that it’s had building up its own industrial base. But it also has this political element to it. It’s, in part, animated by the success that Trump had making China an issue with working-class American voters.

You didn’t have to lose your job to China to feel like China was a stand-in for the forces that have taken away good-paying middle-class jobs from American workers who expected those jobs to be there. And so Trump tapped into that. And Biden is trying to tap into that. And the political incentives are pushing every future American president to do more of that. So I think we are going to see even more of this going forward, and that’s why we’re in such an interesting moment right now.

So we’re going to see more fortresses.

More fortresses, more troops, more money.

Jim, thank you.

You’re welcome.

Here’s what else you should know today. Intense fighting between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of Northern Gaza over the weekend, an area where Israel had declared Hamas defeated earlier in the war, only to see the group reconstitute in the power vacuum that was left behind. The persistent lawlessness raised concerns about the future of Gaza among American officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the return of Hamas to the North left him concerned that Israeli victories there would be, quote, “not sustainable,” and said that Israel had not presented the United States with any plan for when the war ends.

And the United Nations aid agency in Gaza said early on Sunday that about 300,000 people had fled from Rafah over the past week, the city in the enclave’s southernmost tip where more than a million displaced Gazans had sought shelter from Israeli bombardments elsewhere. The UN made the announcement hours after the Israeli government issued new evacuation orders in Rafah, deepening fears that the Israeli military was preparing to invade the city despite international warnings.

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Carlos Prieto, Sidney Harper, and Luke Vander Ploeg. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin, Brendan Klinkenberg, and Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Diane Wong, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

May 17, 2024 • 51:10 The Campus Protesters Explain Themselves
May 16, 2024 • 30:47 The Make-or-Break Testimony of Michael Cohen
May 15, 2024 • 27:03 The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System
May 14, 2024 • 35:20 Voters Want Change. In Our Poll, They See It in Trump.
May 13, 2024 • 27:46 How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China
May 10, 2024 • 27:42 Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand
May 9, 2024 • 34:42 One Strongman, One Billion Voters, and the Future of India
May 8, 2024 • 28:28 A Plan to Remake the Middle East
May 7, 2024 • 27:43 How Changing Ocean Temperatures Could Upend Life on Earth
May 6, 2024 • 29:23 R.F.K. Jr.’s Battle to Get on the Ballot
May 3, 2024 • 25:33 The Protesters and the President
May 2, 2024 • 29:13 Biden Loosens Up on Weed

Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Produced by Nina Feldman , Carlos Prieto , Sydney Harper and Luke Vander Ploeg

Edited by M.J. Davis Lin , Brendan Klinkenberg and Lisa Chow

Original music by Diane Wong , Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

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Donald Trump upended decades of American policy when he started a trade war with China. Many thought that President Biden would reverse those policies. Instead, he’s stepping them up.

Jim Tankersley, who covers economic policy at the White House, explains.

On today’s episode

Jim Tankersley , who covers economic policy at the White House for The New York Times.

At a large shipping yard, thousands of vehicles are stacked in groups. Red cranes are in the background.

Background reading

Mr. Biden, competing with Mr. Trump to be tough on China , called for steel tariffs last month.

The Biden administration may raise tariffs on electric vehicles from China to 100 percent .

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The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Luke Vander Ploeg is a senior producer on “The Daily” and a reporter for the National Desk covering the Midwest. More about Luke Vander Ploeg

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Entrepreneurship is a promising business avenue that individuals, groups and governments can explore and adopt for economic progress. However, there have been high rates of failure of entrepreneurial start-ups within their first 5 years across the globe. In this regard, the aim of the study was to explore ways of improving the sustainability of entrepreneurial start-ups. The study employed a ...
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A business person, therefore, has to look different other sources from where the need of the funds ... (2016) in her research paper title "Government initiative for Entrepreneurship development- Start up India ... (NDA) (2016) explains "A startup is faced with a number of issues that have to be dealt with in order to grow into a successful ...
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scalable business model" (Blank, 2010). A startup is in its early stage. A startup young, dynamic, and built on technology and innovation. The founders of startups attempt to capitalize on developing a product or service for which they believe there is a demand. A startup is a company that is beginning to develop and grow. It is
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