The influence of the technological regime on the performance of Italian innovative start-ups.

Entrepreneurship scholars interested in the performance of innovative start-ups mainly focus on the internal factors related to innovation processes. In the present paper, the research perspective used to study the performance of innovative start-ups is broadened by also considering the influence of the context – more specifically, the technological regime, defined as the state of the art of the technological environment resulting from technological changes/upgrades. Thus, the objective of this study is to investigate if and to what extent the technological regime can affect the performance of innovative start-ups. Statistical elaborations for about 11,760 Italian innovative start-ups (data are retrieved from the Italian Ministry of Economic Development website and are current up to January 2021) are carried out through the estimation of a stochastic frontier analysis: a parametric model. This methodology identifies the causes of inefficiency and disentangles random from technical inefficiency of the model. The results reveal that the technological regime affects performance but, unexpectedly, does not boost the impact of internal factors (related to innovation processes) on performance. The main conclusion is that internal innovation-related factors and the technological regime do not benefit each other when innovation processes are managed in innovative start-ups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]