Publications
Publications
- 2023
- HBS Working Paper Series
Where Strategy Matters: Evidence from a Global Startup Field Study
By: Nataliya Langburd Wright
Abstract
The role of strategy for innovative startups is theoretically ambiguous and much debated among
practitioners. I interviewed executives of 253 scaling software ventures from 34 countries and
scored the alignment of their market and organizational choices to detect whether they have a
strategy, developing the first dataset of its kind. Having a strategy predicts performance more
for non-US-headquartered startups, for which a one standard deviation increase in the strategy
score is associated with an increase in valuation by over a third. Yet, non-US startups are less
likely to develop a strategy; they have a 0.3 standard deviation lower strategy score than do
others. Additional analyses suggest that mistakes are more costly in non-US contexts because
of financial, talent, and cultural differences, penalizing firms there without a strategy that helps
anticipate sources of failure. Creating a strategy, however, is more difficult without the ability to
learn from prior mistakes. Together, this research suggests that in institutional contexts where
mistakes are more costly, strategy matters more, but is also harder to develop.
Keywords
Entrepreneurship And Strategy; Scaling Technology Ventures; Global Contextual Intelligence; Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Global Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy
Citation
Wright, Nataliya Langburd. "Where Strategy Matters: Evidence from a Global Startup Field Study." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 23-041, January 2023. (Revised July 2023.)