Can adopting lean startup strategy promote the sustainable development of new ventures? The mediating role of organizational iterative learning

Kai Zhuge, Huitao He, Yongzhi Yuan and Peiting Sun

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 8, 1-20

Abstract: When high uncertainty becomes the norm in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial failure often becomes the first natural barrier that new ventures face. In dynamic environment, there is still a lack of clear answers on what strategic orientation new ventures need to adopt to improve organizational learning efficiency and achieve sustainable development. Lean startup theory believes that the entrepreneurial process is also a process where organizational cognition is constantly iterated and updated, which drives entrepreneurs to explore business opportunities through iteration learning and early customer insight. The paper aims to describe and examine the relationship between lean startup strategy, organizational iterative learning, and sustainable development of new ventures. This model is tested on the survey data of R&D departments of 325 technology new ventures in China. The research results show that: lean startup strategy can positively affect sustainable performance of new ventures; organizational iterative learning plays a mediating role in the relationship between lean startup strategy and sustainable development; market dynamics positively moderate the relationship between organizational iterative learning and sustainable development, while technology dynamics negatively moderate this relationship; furthermore, the two also moderate the process of lean startup strategy influencing sustainable development through organizational iterative learning, and that moderated mediating effect is significant. The research results reveal that entrepreneurs should deepen lean startup practices in new business layout, advocate the iteration and output of advanced knowledge, help enterprises establish proprietary knowledge barriers, and achieve sustainable development.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0290849 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 90849&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0290849

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0290849

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().