Quality Assessment: PhD Dissertation Process

As part of the quality assessment process for the PhD candidate’s dissertation, last Friday 13th, Ferran Giones presented his preliminary results on his thesis: Venture Emergence in New Technology-based Firms. In his work Ferran aims to provide a better understanding of the first development steps of technology-based firms, his research benefits from the support of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation that provides access to the Kauffman Firm Survey micro data. The presentation had as invited panel members: Prof. Gabriel Fernàndez, Prof. Antoni Olivé, and Prof. Paul Fox. His thesis supervisor is Prof. Francesc Miralles.

To get a more detailed view of his ongoing work, we include the abstract of one of his research papers on the topic:

Technology entrepreneurship is used to describe a context where the entrepreneur is concerned with developing a technical innovation and establish a position in a nascent market. This dual source of tension has made technology-based entrepreneurship a singular and little understood phenomenon. This paper extends the resource-based view to describe how entrepreneurs manage the tension between technology and market to build a viable business. Taking the lenses of the demand-side view, we introduce the influence of technology and marketing development efforts on the technology entrepreneurship venture emergence.

We have analyzed a sample of new technology-based firms using the longitudinal data from the Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) to explore the effects of human capital, technology development efforts, and marketing development efforts, on the venture emergence of the new firms.

The results provide evidences of the limited role of entrepreneur’s human capital (entrepreneurial and industry experience) in its venture development. Moreover, unexpected insights are gathered on the differential impact of technology and marketing actions, showing that while increasing market oriented actions provides a significant positive impact on venture emergence, doing the same with technology oriented activities does not. The findings provide novel insights on the technology entrepreneurship process, in particular on the explanatory value of introducing marketing and innovation management theory in entrepreneurship research.

For further information on his research work, please check his profile.