Readiness Assessment for IDE Startups: A Pathway toward Sustainable Growth

Abstract

Innovation-driven enterprises (IDEs) steer their businesses with ideas, technology, and innovation. However, many of them have limited resources, capabilities, and readiness to turn their valuable creativity into marketable products. For IDE startups to survive and achieve sustainable growth, they must seek financial and other, non-pecuniary support from governmental agencies and large corporate venture capitalists. Usually, governments and large firms need to determine the readiness level (RL) of IDE startups, in order to set up proper strategies for resource allocation, resource prioritization, and collaborative R&D to support startups. In addition, IDE startups themselves also need to perform self-assessment of their readiness level to identify rooms for improvement. This research addresses the significance of IDE readiness assessment. An assessment framework, connecting four dimensions, specifically technology, manufacturing, business, and commerce, is proposed, and three case examples are presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed framework.