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Entrepreneurship literature recognizes the founder’s involvement as a salient factor in determining the success of startups. Nevertheless, its role in conjunction with the marketing roles of founders has been relatively unexplored. Very little is known about how founder’s involvement in marketing tasks (i.e. developing products, sales and customers) helps attain success in early startups. To fill this knowledge gap, this study aims to qualitatively investigate the founder’s involvement under three vital functional areas (i.e. sales, customer development and product development) and also explain their entwined nature of the relationship as the early-stage startups grow to become a scalable businesses.

This study used purposive sampling for conducting in-depth interviews with 11 startup founders in the midwestern city of the USA. A constant comparative method was used to code the interview transcripts, while juxtaposing them with extant literature.

Using three levels of axial coding, this study identified 32 descriptive codes, 11 aggregate codes and 2 interpretive codes. Following this, the authors present five propositions that illustrate the relationship between founders’ involvement, customer development, product development and sales.

This study offers guidelines to founders on how they could generate initial sales, identify early customers and build and sustain mutually beneficial relationships with them.

This study contributes to the extant literature on entrepreneurship and innovation literature. It presents motivation and potential processes, including systematic activities performed by founders in generating sales in conjunction with customer development and product development, thereby making a novel contribution.

This paper seeks to critically review developments in the literature spanning personnel management, HRM, learning organization and intellectual capital approaches to employee utilization and development. The purpose being to identify the benefits, limitations and lessons for the management of people in the co‐operative and mutual sectors.

The problem of inadequate Personnel or HRM systems in the majority of co‐operatives has been established by the author over a period of seven years, field work with co‐operative organizations including the international co‐operative alliance (ICA), asian confederation of credit unions (ACCU), and the British society for co‐operative studies. Direct interviews and a sample of HRM and Membership Relations audit forms developed as part of the ongoing field research and special project work have been applied to various co‐operative contexts in all the regions of the ICA.

The findings are that co‐operatives generally are lagging behind the private sector in their application of all four approaches. Mostly smaller co‐operatives lack effective basic personnel systems and few of the larger co‐operatives go beyond HRM. This failure to develop clear programs for the utilization and development of their people is a missed opportunity.

The membership base and its roots in a community of shared interests means that, whilst co‐operatives have lessons to learn from all four approaches, they can and must go beyond them if they are to optimize their people‐centered business advantage in the marketplace.

The paper suggests a new strategy for co‐operatives of Co‐operative Social Capital Management to help them compete, whilst retaining their co‐operative difference.

Uncertainty in the early development of digital business startups can benefit from data-driven testing of hypotheses. Startups face uncertainty not only in product development, but also over the structure of the business model and the nature of the customer or market to address. The authors conceptualize a new model, the Lean Discovery Process (LDP), which focuses on market-based testing from the early business idea through to fully realized product stages of an innovation. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a methodology to help digital business reduce uncertainty and apply lean principles as early as possible in the development of a business concept.

Examining literature in lean startups, lean user experience and lean software development, the authors highlight underlying assumptions of existing lean models. The authors then examine the LDP using the case of raiserve, a social entrepreneurship startup that focuses on the management of cause-based voluntary service.

Existing literature focuses on product development against an assumed customer base. Early hypothesis testing can be applied to business concept development to substantially reduce cost and time to market.

Further investigation of different forms of uncertainty in digital startups can open up opportunities to further apply lean methodologies. A more extensive empirical study to measure the potential impact is warranted.

The authors conceptualize the minimum viable customer and support early testing with concepts from market research and collective intelligence. The authors demonstrate early opportunities to apply lean principles and rigorous hypothesis testing in an LDP that results in significant reductions in time and expense of product development.

It is all too easy in the hectic world of business to get too involved with the day‐to‐day managing of processes and events. When this happens it is difficult to see the wood for the trees and the automatic pilot syndrome takes over. This does not suggest that you do not know what you are doing ‐ on the contrary you are probably as switched on to whatever activity you are managing as anyone could be. What you could be missing, however, is the explanation as to why you are doing it. If this sounds familiar to you, what might be needed is a detached period from your work. By this I mean stay on the high ground for a while so you can get an overview of what you are doing and, more importantly, why you are doing it. How many managers, I wonder, get the opportunity to question what they are doing? If you allow yourself to slip into complacency then you and your organization will soon lose competitive advantage.

The study examines how supply chain responsiveness (logistics process responsiveness, operations systems responsiveness and supplier network responsiveness) impacts the ability of firms to attract, satisfy and retain customers.

Using a quantitative approach, a total of 250 questionnaires were distributed to firms in the Kumasi metropolis in the Ashanti Region of Ghana, with 100 useable responses retrieved. The effect of supply chain responsiveness on customer development was analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling.

The findings showed that operations systems responsiveness and supplier network responsiveness drive the logistics systems responsiveness of firms as hypothesized. It was also revealed that operations systems responsiveness and logistics process responsiveness enhanced customer development, but supplier network responsiveness did not. Logistics process responsiveness additionally partially mediated the effect of operations systems responsiveness on customer development.

To the best of the researchers' knowledge, no previous studies have empirically examined interrelationships between the dimensions of supply chain responsiveness. Additionally, no previous study has examined the effect of supply chain responsiveness on customer development.

Outlines a product definition process which has proved to be successful with the Queensferry Telecom Operation within Hewlett Packard. The process involves two levels of customer relationship – one classed as “development partners” – and the rest as “other” customers. The development partners directly influence a new product definition with supporting information drawn from the other customers and the market competition. The other customers′ needs are addressed after product launch as part of a follow‐on programme of incremental development.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of key strategic factors in new service development (NSD). In particular, the role of service development strategy, a formalised development process, integrated development teams and customer co‐creation were investigated and the results were compared with managers' beliefs.

The study used a sample of more than 500 service development projects to test a NSD conceptual model. Regression analysis was used to test the relative importance of the key strategic factors, and the results were compared with managers' beliefs.

The results show that managers believe that customer co‐creation is most important in order to succeed with NSD. However, contrary to management belief, a service development strategy is the “missing link” in improving NSD performance. In addition, the research highlighted an interaction effect between integrated development teams and customer co‐creation, which means that project managers should focus on individual competencies on the development team and how they interact with customers throughout the NSD process.

For a long time, NSD has failed to receive the attention it deserves, not just in practice but also in service research. This study shows that the number of new services put on the market and then withdrawn because of low sales remains as high as 43 per cent. This paper contributes knowledge on how to reduce the number of failures in NSD by pointing out the key strategic factors that influence NSD performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the knowledge transfer processes of knowledge intensive business service firms by focusing on the knowledge for customer, which is the knowledge about the service provider's products and services, specifically “before‐sale” knowledge, and the transfer of this knowledge in order to develop customers.

The authors conducted an in‐depth qualitative study of the knowledge transfer process undertaken by a sample of six global knowledge intensive service firms, to use knowledge transfer as a means of customer development.

The results of this study suggest that customer absorptive capacity influences the role that knowledge for customers has in ultimately determining whether customer development will occur. Where tacit knowledge transfer occurs, it is restricted to loyal, high share customers. With respect to methods of transfer, the findings reveal that knowledge‐intensive business service firms transferring explicit knowledge utilise both formal and informal methods.

Data collection was cross‐sectional and longitudinal research would have the benefit of examining how customer knowledge transfer changes over time during the customer development process (pre‐sale, during sale and post‐sale customer development). Future research studying other types of knowledge transfer, such as during‐sale and after‐sale knowledge transfer, are also encouraged.

Managers should be open to employing numerous types of media in transferring both explicit and tacit knowledge rather than restricting themselves to the normative “explicit‐formal‐media lean” versus “tacit‐informal‐media rich” categorisations in the literature.

Understanding the role of customer knowledge transfer in the development of existing organisational customers is particularly important in the context of knowledge intensive business service firms. The extant literature recognises that customer development efforts are critically important in increasing service adoption and firm performance but there exists a dearth of research on customer knowledge transfer in the context of professional service organisations.

The purpose of the paper is to create an increased understanding of new product development processes concerning customer involvement. A relationship marketing perspective has provided the theoretical basis, allowing a new perspective.

A qualitative, multiple case study, based on in‐depth interviews in three small companies and three large, multinational enterprises has been carried out.

The findings indicate the value of cross‐functional teams and customer involvement. The use of formal methods for customer involvement, however, is found to be limited. Some creative ways of using cross‐functional teams in small companies are described.

A framework for customer involvement in new product development, based on the levels of relationships, is proposed. This framework conceptualises the customer‐involvement options identified in earlier research, based on the levels of relationship as defined in relationship marketing theory.

The framework gives directions how product development in various levels of relations could be handled. The paper also gives examples of how to organise cross‐functional teams.

The framework developed in the paper is useful for the theoretical conceptualisation of the area. In addition, it provides a structured base for future studies.

Ambidexterity refers to the ability to balance contradictory items and has been extensively described in relation to technological advancement in large-sized manufacturing firms. Few studies on hospitality and tourism firms have described the balancing of innovative developments, often focusing on the operational level of firms. Ambidexterity could though be understood also in dimensions of customer/market development and collaborative interaction. This paper describes and discusses ambidexterity in the dimensions of technological advancement, customer/market development and collaborative interaction in service firms to inspire this debate and bridge the gap between strategy and the service field.

A case study describing a service firm's 25-year development functions as the empirical source of inspiration to understand how service firms also in tourism and hospitality sectors would work with strategies and their developments related to technology, customers and collaboration. The case study is analysed using an activity-based time schedule to capture dimensions of ambidexterity and how they are linked to one another.

The findings indicate how the service firm balanced exploitation and exploration over time, rather than allowing such activities to occur simultaneously and in parallel. Generally, the firm only managed to explore in one dimension at the time.

The paper broadens the lens on ambidexterity to include collaboration and customer involvement and the link among the various dimensions of ambidexterity. It also discusses how ambidexterity in these dimensions may be handled by service firms so as to inspire strategic developments among tourism and hospitality firms.