Offerings That are “Ever-in-the-Making”

Abstract

Digital ventures are entrepreneurial young firms that introduce new digital artifacts that are “ever-incomplete” and “perpetually-in-the-making” onto the market. The study examines how six digital ventures continued to develop their digital market offerings post launch. Three key designing mechanisms are identified that explain continuous post-launch product development in digital ventures: deploying complementary digital objects, architectural amplification, and porting. The study discusses how these mechanisms advance our understanding of how digital technologies change entrepreneurial processes and outcomes.

Growing online‐to‐offline platform businesses: How Vytal became the world‐leading provider of smart reusable food packaging

“…Since building an offline product initially is more capital‐intensive than building an online platform (von Briel et al, 2018), doing it right the first time matters. While an online platform is reprogrammable and can be deployed as a minimum viable digital product to be developed further after launch (Lehmann & Recker, 2022), ensuring the enduring quality of an offline product is critical at launch. For Vytal, creating precise material and design specifications that match the requirements of their user base (both partners and consumers) was essential for designing a quality offline product.…”

Digital Entrepreneurship: What is New if Anything?

“…Second, and further following the idea of the digital divide, new capabilities (i.e., digital capability divide, Wei et al 2011 ) are needed by digital entrepreneurs to successfully establish new digital business models. Agile and user-centric thinking enable “ever-in-the-making” products and new measures are needed to secure such offerings and ensure their constant availability, particularly for services delivered via the cloud (Lehmann and Recker 2022 ). Moreover, the ubiquity of digital products and services combined with lower propensity to pay strong salaries (due to scarce resources) on the one hand and scarce labor supply on the other, leads to higher demand for new forms of distributed work.…”

“…On the one hand, this allows positive effects such as over-the-air updates or bug-fixes for digitally-enabled physical products (e.g., Tesla often fixes bugs in their cars via over-the-air updates). On the other hand, it also poses new challenges to start-ups to enable continuous development and deployment of updates during runtime without outages (e.g., cloud software) as the authors of one of this Special Issue’s papers study (Lehmann and Recker 2022 ). Dropbox is a good example of this as their initial offering was an introductory video and sign-up function only.…”

“…Two literature reviews aim to extend theory (Kreuzer et al 2022 ) and explore the roots of digital entrepreneurship to problematize the field and offer future research directions (Kollmann et al 2022 ). Two papers report on case studies that were conducted to explore the importance of context in digital entrepreneurship (Keller et al 2022 ) and build theory to explain post-launch product development in digital ventures (Lehmann and Recker 2022 ). The final paper develops a taxonomy from a case base of 100 start-ups that illustrates different ways AI can change business models (Weber et al 2022 ).…”

“…Papers explore topics such as dispersed agency, blurred boundaries, digital capabilities, digital product development, and the evolution from Internet entrepreneurship to digital entrepreneurship and stages in between. One paper is atheoretical (Kollmann et al 2022 ), two apply existing theory (Keller et al 2022 ; Kreuzer et al 2022 ), and two aim to build new theory by developing a taxonomy of AI business models (Weber et al 2022 ) and a conceptual model of continuous post-launch product development (Lehmann and Recker 2022 ). Now that the general trends have been described, a brief summary of each article is provided.…”