ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEYS OF DIGITAL START-UP: SELECTED CASES OF KOLKATA

Abstract

The study encompasses 50 local hi-tech entrepreneurs who have collectively founded more than 120 digital start-ups and enfold entrepreneurship and digital technologies literature in order to explain how the characteristics and affordances of digital technologies impact digital entrepreneurship. The study will explore the process of how founders enter venturing and create (and pause, abandon, pivot, repeat or persist with) their digital start-ups in a long-term entrepreneurial journey. It will be discovered that in a digitized world, the long-term entrepreneurial journeys of experienced professionals as founders yield useful new insights about how digital technologies enable entrepreneurship. It will propose that a stage-based framework to describe this journey–locating their dimensions of entry, transition and long-term engagement with entrepreneurship, and the new venture creation process within such a journey.