A social cognitive perspective in innovation ecosystems: Understanding startups from ideation to consolidation in industry 4.0 era

This research explores how startups oriented to Industry 4.0 mature their concepts, products, and business across evolutionary lifecycles in the innovation ecosystem. We examine how startups mature their business by through four lifecycle stages: Ideation, MVP, Traction, and Consolidation, by collaborating with other actors in the innovation ecosystem. We adopt a social cognitive perspective using its four core properties: intentionally, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness to explain how startups acquire knowledge to become self-effective in mastering skills and competencies required to develop their solutions. We employ a qualitative and longitudinal case study spanning five years within an innovation ecosystem, including more than 30 follow-up sessions, 27 semi-structured interviews, and a survey with 120 startups. Our findings reveal that startups in their initial stages exhibit more open, transparent, and exploratory behavior towards ecosystem actors. As they evolve, they become more specific and formal throughout their lifecycle, interacting, co-creating, and adding value among various groups or stakeholders, ultimately reaching a multi-sided platform governance structure. We also present a framework illustrating how startups typically relate to other ecosystem actors to mature their businesses. Our results can help entrepreneurs overcome the stages of a startup's lifecycle and achieve consolidation in the market.