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—validated with human and AI
approaches—to detect whether they have a strategy, developing the first dataset of its kind.
Having a strategy predicts performance more for non-US 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 May 2023.)