Lean startup for opportunity exploitation: adoption constraints and strategies in technology new ventures

Purpose: Most studies investigating the adoption of lean startup (LS) practices by technology new ventures focus on software startups in mature entrepreneurial ecosystems and disregard their applicability for opportunity exploitation in other technological backgrounds. This study contributes to this research stream by exploring how Brazilian technology new ventures (in different technological fields) tentatively adopt LS to exploit opportunities and whether LS is suitable to their emerging economy context. Design/methodology/approach: The authors adopt an exploratory multiple-case study based on qualitative data collection and analysis of nine Brazilian biotechnology, engineering and software startups. Findings: The study shows how technology new ventures tackle the activities of opportunity exploitation – namely, developing a product or service, acquiring human resources, gathering financial resources and setting up the organization – by leveraging LS tools and practices for business model validation; also, it identifies six contextual constraints hindering the systematic adoption of LS and reveals how technology new ventures cope with such constraints in their early stages by integrating LS with complementary strategies and practices. Furthermore, the study reveals that the systematic and comprehensive adoption of LS nurtures the development of an entrepreneurial experimental capability to explore opportunities in a quasi-scientific and hypothesis-driven fashion. Originality/value: The study investigates how Brazilian engineering, biotechnology and software startups exploit opportunities and overcome constraints to business model validation through the combined adoption of LS and complementary strategies and practices and provides a set of propositions to guide future research.