Pivoting Isn’t Enough? Managing Strategic Reorientation in New Ventures

Rory McDonald () and Cheng Gao ()
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Rory McDonald: Technology and Operations Management Unit, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163
Cheng Gao: Ross School of Business, Strategy Area, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109

Organization Science, 2019, vol. 30, issue 6, 1289-1318

Abstract: New ventures often experience deviations from their plans that oblige them to reorient in pursuit of a better fit between their evolving products and their target customers. Yet, research is largely silent on how managers explain such changes and justify their ventures in the wake of fundamental redirections in strategy. Ventures initially attain legitimacy and amass resources on the strength of aims that audiences find compelling; later, those early claims can complicate course corrections. To shed light on how ventures manage strategic reorientations, we conducted an inductive, comparative case study of ventures in a nascent financial-technology sector. The ventures pursued parallel reorientations and produced comparable end products but diverged conspicuously in managing audiences during transitions. Our process model, inspired by these differences, proposes a sequence of stratagems that may enable entrepreneurs to alter strategy while portraying faithfulness to enduring aims. Our theoretical framework posits that, for ventures, reorientation without penalty may depend on how they anticipate, justify, and stage changes to various audiences.

Keywords: strategic reorientation; pivots; technology entrepreneurship; innovation; product-development processes; rhetorical strategy; organizational adaptation; experimentation; startups; qualitative methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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