Purpose
Strategic pivoting, the decision to invest in shifting the attention of an organization, is no longer limited to early-stage organizations and entrepreneurs but has, without a discussion of ...complications, been applied to large corporations and public agencies.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper defines strategic pivoting, highlights the centrality of pivoting in new and entrepreneurial organizations and critically examines its application as a strategy fostering organizational agility in corporations.
Findings
Pivoting in the corporate context complicates the ease of executing an attention shift by introducing a path-dependent momentum that requires modification of the time horizon, stakeholder strategy and the frequency of pivoting.
Practical implications
This comparative examination of pivoting highlights the importance of organizational size, complexity, degree of specialization and path-dependent history when deciding to pivot.
Originality/value
The present ease with which the strategic pivot is treated as an adaptive strategy to corporate leaders seeking greater flexibility overstates the ease of execution.
We examine how entrepreneurs rework the temporal commitments implicated in their venture ideas when they persevere or pivot upon confronting unexpected events. To gain a deeper understanding of how ...entrepreneurs recalibrate temporal positioning, length, and ordering of actions and milestones, we systematically analyzed 22 episodes across five ventures when entrepreneurs had to decide whether to persevere or to pivot. To persevere, entrepreneurs positioned their actions as a continuation of the past, while increasing the temporal length and complexity of temporal ordering, thereby avoiding disruptive changes to their relational commitments. In contrast, entrepreneurs repositioned their actions on a revised timeline in order to pivot. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our findings for theory on entrepreneurial action.
•When entrepreneurs encounter unexpected events, they have to attend to relational and temporal commitments simultaneously.•Pivoting and perseverance require a recalibration of the temporal commitments associated with venture ideas.•To persevere, entrepreneurs position actions as continuation of the past, extend timelines and complexify temporal ordering.•To pivot, they reposition actions on a revised timeline by reinterpreting the past to align with a new projected future.
Recent literature suggests entrepreneurs struggle to pivot—or fundamentally change aspects of their venture—due to identity-based resistance to change. Yet, when entrepreneurs receive negative ...feedback, overcoming this resistance may be important to pivoting their business model. We adopt a convergent, mixed methods research design to explore when and why some entrepreneurs overcome resistance to change in response to negative feedback during early-stage business model experimentation. Building upon qualitative data that we gathered and analyzed, we theorize entrepreneurs may resist pivoting their value proposition relative to other business model components despite receiving negative feedback on this aspect of their business model. However, we find three factors – entrepreneurial experience, startup mentoring, and team size – may enable entrepreneurs to pivot in response to negative feedback. We theorize that these factors broaden a startup team's perspective, enabling value proposition pivoting during early-stage business model experimentation. We test these relationships with quantitative data from 80 startups engaged in business model experimentation and find support across hypotheses. We contribute to understanding when and why entrepreneurs pivot aspects of their business models in response to negative feedback during early-stage business model experimentation.
The entrepreneurship literature suggests startups may benefit from experimentation and pivoting different parts of their business model in response to negative feedback from stakeholders (Andries et al., 2021; Camuffo et al., 2020; Shepherd and Gruber, 2021). In early stages of starting a new venture, a business model refers to a cognitive schema or belief about an activity system that could potentially create and capture value (Massa et al., 2017; Shepherd and Gruber, 2021). Business model experimentation is the process of testing assumptions underlying this potential business model and pivoting business model assumptions in response to negative feedback (Andries et al., 2013; McDonald and Eisenhardt, 2020; Leatherbee and Katila, 2020). Building upon prior literature, we define business model pivoting as a fundamental change to parts of the business model (Berends et al., 2021; Snihur and Clarysse, 2022; Shepherd and Gruber, 2021). Yet, literature also suggests founders often struggle to pivot assumptions despite negative feedback. Motives to preserve and protect certain assumptions relevant to founders' identities can interfere with pivoting (Grimes, 2018; Kirtley and O'Mahony, 2023; Zuzul and Tripsas, 2020). Despite the general understanding that founders struggle to change their ideas, however, the entrepreneurship literature currently lacks precise insight into when and why founders can overcome resistance to pivoting.
In this research, we explore when and why startups pivot different parts of their business model. We do so within the context of early-stage business model experimentation, where founders explicitly state assumptions about different parts of their potential business model, test those assumptions against stakeholder feedback, and are encouraged to pivot business model components in response to negative feedback. Through a mixed methods research design, we find (1) founders tend to resist pivoting their value propositions relative to other parts of a business model in response to negative feedback; and (2) entrepreneurial experience, startup mentoring, and team size enables startups to overcome this resistance to pivoting in response to negative feedback. We theorize these factors broaden founders' perspectives (Warshay, 1962), contributing to a greater willingness to pivot during experimentation.
We contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial pivoting by explaining nuanced variation in pivoting distinct business model components during experimentation. This contribution is important because it reveals that resistance to pivoting the business model may be more complex than previously thought. We also contribute to the literature at the nexus of business model experimentation and entrepreneurial cognition by finding that entrepreneurial experience, startup mentoring, and team size enable startups to pivot despite psychological resistance to pivoting in response to negative feedback because it broadens founders' perspectives. This insight is important theoretically because it advances what we know about enabling experimenting with business models under conditions of uncertainty. The research presented here has clear and important implications for practice. This research suggests founders often resist changing the value proposition versus other components of their business models in early stages of venture development. This resistance can impede experimentation and pivoting in response to negative feedback. To the extent founders want to broaden their perspective to enable pivoting their value propositions in response to negative feedback during early stages of venture development, our data suggest they may be able to do so by recruiting members with entrepreneurial experience on their team (or gain entrepreneurial experience themselves), engage frequently with startup mentors, and increase the size of their team. Overall, we view the breath of perspective that comes from experience and interactions with others as an advantage for entrepreneurs when experimenting with their business models during early stages of venture development.
•When and why do startups pivot distinct business model components during early-stage experimentation?•Using a mixed-methods design, we observe that founders resist pivoting the value proposition of their business models.•We also find that entrepreneurial experience, startup mentoring, and a larger team size may enable pivoting the value proposition.•We theorize these factors all contribute to a breadth of perspective that in turn enables change.•Our insights contribute to the literatures on business model experimentation, pivoting, and enablers of change.
The aim of this work is to provide a complete list of all the possible values that the first six pivots of an Hadamard matrix of order 20 can take. This is accomplished by determining the possible ...values of certain minors of such matrices, in combination with the fact that the pivots can be computed in terms of these minors. We extend known results, by giving a different proof for the complete list of possible values for each of the first five pivots, as well as determining the complete list of possible values for the sixth pivot. By using a computational approach to search for new pivot patterns, we have also found at least 1246 different pivot patterns of Hadamard matrices of order 20.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Kenya were severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions put in place to contain it. This study assesses the impact of these restrictions on the ...midstream of the potato and fish value chains, with a focus on traders and processors, and investigates the short- and longer-term responses and ‘pivoting’ strategies deployed by these firms. Longitudinal data were collected from 937 respondents with three recall periods: (1) the pre-pandemic situation (2019); (2) the period of strictest restrictions, necessitating immediate adaptations by firms (2020); and (3) a period of anticipated recovery with longer-term business adaptation strategies (2021). Firms in both value chains reported a dramatic drop in turnover in 2020. Potato SMEs partially recovered in 2021, but fish SMEs reported further declines in turnover. In the face of restrictions, SMEs shifted toward more localized procurement and sales, shorter supply chains (often by-passing intermediaries and increasing use of contracts), use of smaller vehicles, and toward the adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) to search for and engage with business partners. Smaller firms and the biggest of businesses were more resilient and less subject to large fluctuations in business turnover, suggesting an inverted U-shape relationship between firm size and impact. Firms located close to production areas and selling primarily within their own county were also less affected. We provide recommendations for increasing business resilience to shocks based on these findings.
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•Critical feedback increases the likelihood of entrepreneurial pivoting.•Self-leadership moderates the relationship between critical feedback and pivoting.•Self-leadership is a ...resource that aids in reacting to critical feedback.
This paper draws on the self-leadership literature to explore who is more likely to respond to critical performance feedback in an early-stage entrepreneurial context. We perform a multi-round laboratory experiment in which participants brainstorm ideas for cricket-based food products, select their best idea, receive randomly generated feedback indicating that their idea is either above average (i.e., non-critical feedback) or below average (i.e., critical feedback), and then decide whether to stick with their original or pivot to a different idea. Results reveal that individuals low in behavioral awareness and constructive cognition, and those high in task motivation, are more likely to pivot to a new product in response to critical feedback. Given the central role responding to feedback plays in entrepreneurship (and in other contexts), these results shed needed light on the question of who is more likely to adapt in response to critical feedback and who is predisposed toward inaction.
New ventures in nascent markets often pivot while still developing their organizational identity. A strong identity helps attract investors and employees and pivoting helps pursue new opportunities. ...How do they interact? To illuminate this process, we conduct an in-depth longitudinal field study of a new venture developing a technology to transform Internet websites for mobile devices. The venture completes a first pivot but fails during a second attempted pivot of its business model in the nascent market. Comparing the completed and the attempted pivot, our analysis suggests that new venture pivoting relies on the ability to crystallize the individual roles of organizational members (“what we do”) in line with organizational identity (“who we are”). Our findings shed light on stakeholder constraints on pivoting by scaling new ventures through the micro-mechanism of role crystallization. Our analysis also delineates the inter-temporal effects of lingering organizational identity, thereby advancing research on the organizational identity dynamics of new ventures.
•Pivoting in a scaling new venture is facilitated by role crystallization•Role crystallization contributes to a lingering organizational identity•Lingering organizational identity can hinder subsequent pivoting•Stakeholder constraints can give rise to diminishing returns from pivoting
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has seen tremendous growth in the last ten years since the early 2000s and has already entered a mature phase. While considered the most widely used solution for ...Machine Translation, its performance on low-resource language pairs remains sub-optimal compared to the high-resource counterparts due to the unavailability of large parallel corpora. Therefore, the implementation of NMT techniques for low-resource language pairs has been receiving the spotlight recently, thus leading to substantial research on this topic. This article presents a detailed survey of research advancements in low-resource language NMT (LRL-NMT) and quantitative analysis to identify the most popular techniques. We provide guidelines to select the possible NMT technique for a given LRL data setting based on our findings. We also present a holistic view of the LRL-NMT research landscape and provide recommendations to enhance the research efforts further.
Axial tibial rotation is a characteristic motion of the knee, but how it occurs with knee flexion is controversial. We investigated the mechanisms of tibial rotations by analyzing in vivo ...tibiofemoral articulations. Twenty knees of 20 living human subjects were investigated during a weightbearing flexion from full extension to maximal flexion using a dual fluoroscopic imaging system. Tibiofemoral articular contact motions on medial and lateral femoral condyles and tibial surfaces were measured at flexion intervals of 15 deg from 0 deg to 120 deg. Axial tibial rotations due to the femoral and tibial articular motions were compared. Articular contact distances were longer on femoral condyles than on tibial surfaces at all flexion intervals (p < 0.05). The articular distance on medial femoral condyle is longer than on lateral side during flexion up to 60 deg. The internal tibial rotation was 6.8 ± 4.5 deg (Mean ± SD) at the flexion interval of 0-15 deg, where 6.1 ± 2.6 deg was due to articulations on femoral condyles and 0.7 ± 5.1 deg due to articulations on tibial surfaces (p < 0.05). The axial tibial rotations due to articulations on femoral condyles are significantly larger than those on tibial surfaces until 60 deg of flexion (p < 0.05). Minimal additional axial tibial rotations were observed beyond 60 deg of flexion. The axial tibial rotations were mainly attributed to uneven articulations on medial and lateral femoral condyles. These data can provide new insights into the understanding of mechanisms of axial tibial rotations and serve as baseline knowledge for improvement of knee surgeries.
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