The Handbook of Technology and Innovation Management

13.2. Resource Assembly

After developing and evaluating the venture idea, the next step in the process of venture development is to secure human and financial resources. Although this conceptualization of linear development is very much stylized (i.e., in the process of trying to obtain resources, the venture idea and business model may be amended), I use this scheme for expositional ease. The main challenges that technical entrepreneurs face during the resource assembly stage are recruiting talented technical workers and managers and convincing financial resource holders to fund the new venture. These challenges are exacerbated for early stage ventures with mostly intangible, intellectual-based assets. I concentrate on relatively early stage ventures in this discussion because ventures that receive early buy-in from resource holders are likely to be the ones that benefit from a virtuous upward cycle of business development, and so entrepreneurial challenges may be most demanding in the early stages of development. I discuss the literature addressing human resource and then financial resource assembly, and conclude by posing some possible future directions in this literature.

A preliminary observation is worth noting before jumping into the discussion: it is important to establish some baseline expectations of why entrepreneurs differ in resource assembly. It would seem that the market for resources is relatively efficient in the sense that ventures of a given quality are matched ...