Customer Involvement in the Entrepreneurship Process of New Ventures
This Special Issue aims to connect entrepreneurship literature with marketing research while advancing entrepreneurship studies and reaching a broad, globally diverse authorship and readership.
Guest Editors
Aron O’Cass, La Trobe University; A.OCass@latrobe.edu.au
Francesco Chirico, Macquarie University & Jonkoping University;francesco.chirico@mq.edu.au
Eileen Fischer, York University; efischer@schulich.yorku.ca
Michael A. Hitt, Texas A&M University & Texas Tech University; mhitt@mays.tamu.edu
G. Tomas M. Hult, Michigan State University; Hult@broad.msu.edu
Mary Tripsas, UC Santa Barbara; mtripsas@ucsb.edu
JBV Editor
Justin W. Webb, UNC Charlotte; justin.w.webb@charlotte.edu
Special issue information:
Motivation for and objective of the special issue
This special issue aims to advance research at the intersection of entrepreneurship, marketing, and innovation to promote a deeper understanding of the role of customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process of new ventures. Recent statistics show that around 20 percent of new ventures fail in their first year, and nearly 50 percent fail within their first five years (Soto‐Simeone et al., 2020; Yu & Wang, 2021) while on average less than one-third of them deliver positive return to investors (Eisenmann, 2021). Data from the postmortems of new venture failures indicate that a major reason for failure in around 42% of cases was the lack of market/customer demand for products (CB Insights, 2019). Thus, the inability to identify the real customer needs for products that can be met with a scalable solution is a major issue. Understanding customer needs is crucial for new ventures’ first product success and therefore for their survival (Cantamessa et al., 2018; Eisenmann, 2021; Song et al., 2009). Promoting a greater understanding of the role of customers in the entrepreneurship process for new ventures can thus provide further insights into the ongoing failure (or success) of new ventures. The Swedish company IKEA celebrated its 80th anniversary, having grown to be the world’s largest furniture retailer, with a reported $51.7 billion in retail sales and 471 stores in 63 countries. Danzinger (2024), writing for Forbes, explains that IKEA’s successful strategy, rooted in its humble beginnings in 1943, is based on “understanding consumers’ emotional needs” and incorporating these insights into their furniture designs and final products.
For marketing and innovation researchers customer involvement in new product development is frequently prescribed for developing successful new products that can generate strong market appeal through the rich knowledge and information derived from customers (Chang & Taylor, 2016; Cui & Wu, 2017; Fischer & Maciel, 2020; Menguc et al., 2014; Ahmadi & O'Cass, 2018). Customer involvement is also important for new product marketing, because, central to the marketing strategy of a firm is its market knowledge of customers (Bhave, 1994; Fischer & Reuber, 2014; Hult et al., 2017; Morgan & Anokhin, 2020; Larson, 1991; Ngo & O'Cass, 2012). Hence, customer involvement enables establishing initial relationships and contacts with potential customers facilitating learning from the customers to better develop new products and implement new product marketing and entrepreneurial activities (Cui & Wu, 2017; Slater & Mohr, 2006). Although often neglected (for few exceptions, see De Clercq & Rangarajan, 2008; Denoo et al., 2022; Newbert et al., 2020; Pryor et al., 2016; Shah and Tripsas, 2020; Song et al., 2010), this appears to be a significant issue for entrepreneurship scholarship to address. As noted by Eisenmann (2021), “by neglecting to research customer needs before commencing their engineering efforts, entrepreneurs end up wasting valuable time and capital on MVP [minimum viable products] that are likely to miss their mark. These are false starts. Entrepreneurs are like sprinters who jump the gun: They’re too eager to get a product out there….‘Launch early and often” and ‘fail fast’—actually encourages this ‘ready, fire, aim’ behavior.”
According to Webb, Ireland, Hitt, Kistruck, and Tihanyi (2011), the entrepreneurship process can be categorized into three stages: discovery of new product opportunities (i.e., opportunity identification), developing and adapting a new product targeting the opportunity (i.e., innovation), and organizing activities around the innovation (i.e., opportunity exploitation). Opportunities hinge on the existence of unmet customer needs. Therefore, customers play a crucial role in generating market insights that can be leveraged through the commercialization of innovative products (Coviello & Joseph, 2012; Newbert, Tornikoski, & Augugliaro, 2020). Yet, despite the role of customers in the entrepreneurship process and its implications for new venture success and survival, “entrepreneurship scholars have largely assumed market opportunities (in essence, the presence of customers) to exist”. Yet, “where is the opportunity without the customer?” (Webb et al., 2011, p. 537). More recently, this point has been brought into sharp focus by Matthews, Chalmers, and Fraser (2018, p. 702) who contend that “[a]s economics without entrepreneurship is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, so too then is entrepreneurship without a deeper conceptualization of the customer”.
While the customers’ role is implicit in entrepreneurship studies as a background descriptor or as an assumed actor (Pryor et al., 2016; Webb et al., 2011), understanding the role of customers in the entrepreneurship process remains theoretically fragmented and lacks a comprehensive integration into a higher-level theorization (Lam & Harker, 2015; Miles & Darroch, 2008; Morgeson, Hult, et al., 2020). While embedded in entrepreneurship literature, the marketing literature explicitly emphasizes the role and importance of the customer. Marketing has a long history of extensive investigations into recognizing customers as a resource and their role in various aspects of marketing, such as new product development, that have the potential to generate value for both customers and the firm (Chang & Taylor, 2016; Cui & Wu, 2017; Menguc, Auh, & Yannopoulos, 2014). While the focus of both entrepreneurship and marketing is on how organizations create and deliver value, these two disciplines have been developed largely in isolation. In fact, despite their evident synergy in real-world applications, scholarly exploration has seen them evolve within distinct disciplinary confines, with limited interplay between them. The lack of ongoing dialogue between these disciplines creates significant theoretical gaps concerning knowledge accumulation on the role of customers in the entrepreneurship process. For example, entrepreneurship literature has a wealth of knowledge on the entrepreneurship process aimed at value creation in terms of opportunity identification, innovation, and opportunity exploitation, which marketing scholars have rarely focused on. Conversely, marketing literature is scarce in the new venture context, and scholars encounter challenges when applying mainstream marketing literature on customers to examine entrepreneurial ventures, primarily due to the acknowledged differences in the role of customers between established and nascent ventures who often operate with incomplete, unpredictable, or unknowable customer-related information (Furr & Eisenhardt, 2021).
This Special Issue aims to connect entrepreneurship literature with marketing research while advancing entrepreneurship studies and reaching a broad, globally diverse authorship and readership. Therefore, we aim to be broad enough to attract a sizable number of high-quality submissions, while also being focused enough to have a clear research theme. To this end, we encourage authors to tap into the entrepreneurship, marketing, and innovation literatures to examine the unique entrepreneurial challenges and opportunities that new ventures face in involving (or not) customers in the entrepreneurship process. We believe that integrating research across the disciplines of entrepreneurship, marketing, and innovation can advance entrepreneurship theory while offering important practical implications. In particular, we encourage submissions that bridge across entrepreneurship, marketing, and innovation. This objective is consistent with JBV’s stature as a multidisciplinary, multifunctional, and multi-contextual journal and as a preeminent forum for business venturing research. A non-exhaustive list of intriguing and important questions researchers could choose to examine for the special issue includes:
1) Nature of customer involvement in new ventures
- How can customer involvement serve as a platform for the entrepreneurship process in new ventures (Morgeson, Hult, et al., 2020)?
- How do new ventures manage the dynamic interplay between the venture and its customers – characterized by collaborative engagement, iterative feedback loops, and mutual value creation (Hult et al., 2017)?
- What resources do customers contribute to the inception and growth of a new venture? Which resources are most valuable, and which resources can be detrimental to product development and market positioning?
- Can an excessive reliance on customer input without proper validation or strategic direction potentially lead to misalignment with market needs or dilution of the venture's unique value proposition?
- How do new ventures develop, deploy, and renew resources to involve customers in the entrepreneurship process while avoiding overreliance through strategic resource management and iterative refinement (Carnes, Hitt, Sirmon, Chirico & Huh, 2022)?
2) New venture success (or failure) driven by customer involvement
- Which forms of innovation in new ventures are most successful in being influenced by customers?
- How can new ventures sense and seize opportunities for innovation through customer involvement?
- What are the characteristics of new ventures and their owners and managers that support greater customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process?
- What contingencies (e.g., resource constraints, stakeholder requirements, environmental aspects) influence the relationship between customer involvement and new venture success (or failure) (Webb et al., 2011)?
- What role does marketing play in enhancing customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process in new ventures?
- Are some new venture forms (e.g., founder firms, family-owned firms, no-profit organizations) more successful than others in effectively involving customers in the entrepreneurial process?
- What conditions facilitate or constrain customer involvement in new venture entrepreneurial activities? What are the entrepreneurial challenges and opportunities that new ventures face in involving (or not) customers in the entrepreneurship process? Do the pros and cons of involving customers change over time (Newbert et al., 2020)?
3) Processes and capabilities in customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process
- What approaches to experimentation of new product ideas with customers can new ventures pursue for successful new product development?
- What collaborative processes with customers and other stakeholders (separately or jointly) during new product development are needed to achieve success in the new venture entrepreneurship process?
- What cognitive and behavioral approaches allow new venture owners and managers to break with linear thinking and lead to customer-driven innovation in the entrepreneurship process (Pryor et al., 2016)?
- What capabilities (e.g., managerial, marketing, innovation, strategic, operational, technical, financial, IT) are needed for successful customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process (Hoskisson, Chirico et al., 2017)?
- How does user entrepreneurship – “the commercialization of a new product and/or service by an individual or group of individuals who are also users of that product and/or service” (Shah and Tripsas, 2007, p. 123) – add value to the entrepreneurship process?
- How significant is user entrepreneurship and/or, more broadly, customer involvement during times of crisis stemming from internal factors (such as financial distress, the sudden death of owners/managers, restructuring events) or external factors (such as environmental shocks, financial crises, the Covid-19 pandemic) (Shah and Tripsas, 2020)?
4) Customer involvement across the life cycle stage of new ventures and beyond:
- How is the customer involved at various stages of entrepreneurship? How do entrepreneurs differ in considering and weighing customers’ rational versus emotional demands over time?
- When should a new venture listen to the customer, and when should it ignore (potential) customer requests or demands overtime? Is there a “right” or “wrong” customer to involve, and should this remain consistent throughout the entrepreneurial process?
- Market orientation is a business approach that prioritizes understanding and satisfying consumer needs. Are companies with a market orientation better off over time, or can a market orientation be detrimental in the earlier (startup) or later (growth, mature) stages of a firm’s development?
- How does customer involvement facilitate or constrain firm-level outcomes, such as disruptive/radical versus incremental innovation, across a firm’s life cycle stages? Also, how can it potentially impact entrepreneurship initiatives, such as corporate and social entrepreneurship over time?
We encourage submissions of empirical and conceptual papers that can provide a unique perspective using diverse methodological approaches, and interdisciplinary co-author teams.
Manuscript submission information:
The Journal of Business Venturing’s submission system will be open for submissions to our Special Issue from June 1st, 2025. When submitting your manuscript to Editorial Manager, please select the article type “VSI: Customer Involvement” and indicate the manuscript is for consideration in “Customer Involvement in the Entrepreneurship Process of New Ventures”. Please submit your manuscript before December 1st, 2025.
Contributors should follow the directions contained in the JBV manuscript submission guidelines: Guide for authors - Journal of Business Venturing - ISSN 0883-9026 | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier
All papers will be reviewed according to the standard policies of the Journal of Business Venturing. It is anticipated that the special issue will be published in 2027.
Further Information
For questions regarding the content of this special issue, please contact the guest editors.
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