Instrumento para avaliação da viabilidade potencial de startup de base tecnológica: empreendedorismo, gestão e tecnologia

Abstract

In recent years, within the evolution of Communication Information Technology (ICT) and considering the greater interactivity between people, business models are constantly changing and increasingly becoming more technological. Facing these changes in models, technology startups are becoming more and more relevant to society. However, they present a high mortality rate in the first years of life. Startups are created from innovative ideas, from observing market phenomena or to supply existing demands and, generally, from the idea of one or more entrepreneurs. Several studies focus on the analysis of startups in the person of the entrepreneur responsible for their creation. The purpose of this research project is to present, from the development of a research using the Design Science Research technique, an instrument that allows to analyze startups, based on three areas of knowledge: entrepreneurial vision, management skills and technical knowledge. In the context of these three capabilities, the research was divided into three stages: first, a systematic literature review was made, in order to identify skills that add greater effectiveness to startups in the technology segment. In this process, several skills were identified, distributed in three fields, namely entrepreneurship, management and technical knowledge. The second stage was the development of a method for measuring these skills and the third one was the procedures to confirm the skills found in the systematic literature review and validate the method with discussions with experts on the subject. The research was able to identify several skills that tend to indicate a higher probability of success for a startup, and that were synthesized in a questionnaire generated from the results and discussion. After the bibliographic and empirical research, the most relevant skills were listed to increase the probability of success of startups. Among the main ones are the vision of opportunities, knowledge of the sector, academic experience and practice in the subject of the startup's business, knowledge of financial and operational management, an adequate corporate governance structure, mastery of pricing models and monetization, the ability to integrate and a wide network of relationships. Based on these and other skills, an instrument that was able to assess the existence or not of skills within a technology-based startup was developed and based on this qualitative analysis, assess from the potential of business success to the development gaps that increase the probability of success, or even the evolution of a startup in the timeline.