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The purpose of this study is to investigate potential lenders of legitimacy for business-to-business (B2B) startups as reflected in the willingness of potential customers to do business with startup firms. This study theorizes the role of familiarity with B2B startups, their founding teams and their product offerings in influencing perceptions about legitimacy among potential customers.

Data are collected from key decision-makers involved in B2B procurements in large Indian companies and analyzed using conjoint analysis.

Results suggest that familiarity with product/service offerings from B2B startups is the most salient factor in forming favorable assessments for the venture, followed by the awareness of the startups and their founding teams, in that order.

The research makes several contributions to understanding the legitimacy of B2B startups from the customers’ perspective. The study provides a nuanced view of the factors impinging on legitimacy. The conceptualization of legitimacy as a reflection of willingness to buy (in other words, willingness to do business with) provides a useful lens with which to study the interactions between B2B startups and potential customers.

The strong empirical support the study finds for the predicted relationships in an international context, specifically India, enhances theory development, providing a solid foundation for future knowledge generation around the demand side legitimacy concept.

The learning outcomes are as follows: assessing the changing trend in the needs of the customer, leading to evolution of new types of businesses in the urban areas. Deep understanding of household service industry and its future. Assessing the skills and capabilities required to become an entrepreneur and follow entrepreneurship. Understanding the aggregator, two-sided business model prevailing in the market. Understand the concept of business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) business model in household industry.

This case study is about two first-generation entrepreneurs from India who started a new innovative service delivery platform, UrbanKare with a vision to organize the household maintenance services industry. The company was founded in 2016 with a seed capital support of the State Government. The idea behind this initiative was to provide customers a professional, reliable and convenient household repair and maintenance services at their fingertips. The biggest challenge they were facing was that of aggregation of service providers (skilled workforce) and maintaining the service quality in the context of B2B and B2C service provision.

PG level courses – Industrial Marketing Startup and Business Entrepreneurship.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

Cold calling being one of the most preferred modes of sales strategies in the past, with all digital platforms setting in, is it still the best option a B2B service firm has? To seek answer to this interesting question is the purpose of this paper. The study seeks to understand the contributions of both the sales force and the digital marketing team towards lead conversion. The paper also aims to derive a sense-making model for lead conversion based on a few propositions of the study.

The authors have adopted mixed method approach. The authors have chosen a small enterprise offering B2B services to understand the sales process. The past one-year cold calling data were analyzed. In addition, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted among the managers and the executives of the firm. The study adopts the AIDA model of customer response and the stages of selling process to better map the sales process of the firm. Based on the analysis, a new model is proposed to aid lead conversions.

The findings suggest that cold calling is not an effective mode of sales strategies in this case as the firm experienced a very low conversion rate. However, with the integration of digital marketing efforts with sales process, the sales team could achieve higher conversion rate.

Very few studies in the literature examines the effectiveness of cold calling strategy integrated with digital marketing efforts. This is one of the few studies examining cold calling strategy in B2B service firm in India.

Razorpay is a four-year-old Indian B2B fintech startup in digital payments which is venturing into digital lending. It aims to simplify digital payment flows involved in acceptance, processing, and disbursement of payments through superior technology and automation. This case details how Razorpay creates value for businesses by offering service convenience in B2B space. Razorpay started as a payment solutions provider, primarily known for their payment gateway. Over time the market for digital payment in India has matured, with multiple providers offering similar products making it difficult for Razorpay to sustain its growth by using technological leadership and service differentiation. To maintain its growth trajectory, Razorpay has launched multiple new products in the digital payment space as well as announced a foray into creating a marketplace for digital lending through launch of Razorpay Capital. The case provides details of the growth of Razorpay and its move from its core strength of payment gateway

Indian Railways (IR) has been slow in innovation. The competition from other modes of transport has posed new challenges to IR. Railways worldwide have taken help from startups to develop innovative solutions to improve railway operations. Such collaborations have helped in leveraging the technical expertise of startups in domains which are non-conventional for railways to develop in-house. These collaborations have been made possible by funding startups through various investment channels.

The purpose of this study is to understand the evolution, current competitive scenario, and future direction for the food-tech business in the Indian market.

The paper is based on press reports, industry reports, and secondary information about companies based on interviews of CEOs, analysts, industry trend watchers, and academicians.

The incumbents are competing on the basis of various parameters such as capital infusion (especially, funding), tie-ups with restaurants, customer loyalty, fleet size and management, and management of employees. High growth is driving volumes for all companies, although there is lack of differentiation in offerings. Companies need to build customer loyalty and seek diverse monetization models for profitability in the future.

First, food-tech companies need to identify means of differentiation to gain competitive advantage. Second, customer loyalty is the key to long-term profitability and firms need to identify ways to build it. Promotions and offers cannot build loyalty. Third, firms would need to expand into different types of monetization methods, such as cloud kitchens, B2B food delivery services, to build revenues and profits.

Incumbents and prospective entrants in the food-tech industry need to understand the structure of the industry and the structure of competition to be able to succeed in the long term. They need to understand that promotions cannot be a differentiator and that funding will dry up. Therefore, it is critical to identify means of differentiation to build a loyal customer base.

The food-tech industry in India has strong social foundation. More than 50 per cent of the Indian population is below the age of 25, the percentage of working population is increasing in India and so are income levels. In this context, the food-tech business is important as order outs are increasing. This, however, has also led to problems in the workforce for such startups as companies do not want to invest in employee training, safety or work conditions owning to high attrition rate because of the standardized nature of the job.

This paper makes an attempt to assimilate information about the progress of the food-tech industry in India in the last few years. It attempts to identify various factors that decide the nature of competition among incumbent players. It also identifies what factors these incumbents need to bear in mind while looking ahead.

Startups have attracted increased attention over the past years. While entrepreneurs develop startups to capture new business opportunities, also large companies are turning to these fast-growing organizations in efforts to become more agile. However, managing business model innovation and validation is challenging. A number of methodologies, like the Lean Startup (LS), emerged to reduce uncertainties concerning innovation-based projects, and to contribute to business model validation. Despite its popularity, the literature on the LS and its key underpinnings (Agile Methodologies and Customer Development) is sparse, lacking an integrated and structured analysis of their impacts and potentialities. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors conducted a comprehensive systematic literature review on the topic fully analyzing a final set of 71 papers.

There is a turning point in the research stream’s maturity with publications in conferences and major journals, with the predominance of empirical investigations in the European region. Articles on the topic are on the rise in several technology fields. However, the literature on the subject falls short on providing guidance to assist practitioners and scholars on the adoption and investigation of these methodologies.

The paper provides guidance for practice by presenting a staircase roadmap for the LS implementation drawing from the final set of papers reviewed.

The study categorizes the current literature through a concept map, and offers a structured research agenda beyond the categories from the thematic analysis.

Science and technology parks (STPs) have a limited capacity, which can create challenging conditions for applicants. This makes the location selection a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem to find and apply for the most appropriate STP with the highest accordance with the startup's requirements. This research aims to select the most appropriate STP to locate an international entrepreneurial pharmaceutical startup under uncertainty. Since drugs are generally produced domestically in developing countries such as Iran, the access of pharmaceutical startups to the resources provided by STPs can lead to overcoming competitors and improving the country's health system.

In this research, the factors or attributes effective on startup location were extracted through a two-round Delphi method, which was performed among 15 experts within three groups. Subsequently, the determining factors were used to select the location of a pharmaceutical startup among possible STPs. In this regard, decision-makers were allowed to use different types of numbers to transfer their opinion. Afterward, the heterogeneous weighted aggregated sum product assessment (HWASPAS) method was applied to calculate the score of each alternative and rank them to place the studied startup successfully.

The results indicated that Tehran STP stands in the first place; however, if the decision was made based on single criterion like cost, some other STPs could be preferable, and many managers would lose this choice. Furthermore, the results of the proposed method were close to other popular heterogeneous MCDM approaches.

A heterogeneous WASPAS is developed in this article for the first time to enable international entrepreneurs to imply their opinion with various values and linguistic variables to reduce the emphasis on accurate data in an uncertain environment.

The success of corporate innovation is based less upon the success of a single innovation program than on a holistic and overarching corporate innovation system integrating various activities. Taking this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to extend existing research on the design of innovation programs.

Utilizing an inductive theory-building case study approach, this study provides a detailed analysis of how one of the largest and most successful German technology companies structures its many innovation activities.

The analysis identifies key elements of innovation programs and suggests three configurations that illustrate how these generic elements can be structured so as to offer the best fit with the underlying logic of the respective innovation program. Furthermore, this study highlights how the identified configurations come together to deliver overarching strategic innovation goals.

Existing research too often focuses solely on single innovation programs. The current research is among the first to take a holistic and overarching perspective, considering different innovation programs within a single company and analyzing their configuration and their interplay.