Introduction

The phenomenon of high-tech start-up survival has been extensively studied in the entrepreneurship literature from multiple theoretical perspectives, the prominent ones being economic, strategic management and evolutionary and behavioural sciences. The motivation for all these studies are twofold. First, start-ups provide context to examine and interpret the theories of entrepreneurship. This is primarily because start-ups are a vehicle of the acts of entrepreneurship or institutional arrangements for demonstration of entrepreneurship by an entrepreneur (Shane 1995; Sarasvathy 2004). Second, small high-tech start-ups have been recognized as the major drivers of job creation and innovation and thus, economic growth (Birch 1979; Baumol 2002; Kirchhoff and Spencer 2008). Birch (1979) showed that small firms created more jobs than large firms. Scherer (1980) and Scherer and Ross (1990) showed that small firms produced disproportionately more innovations than large firms. Further, Kirchoff and Spencer (2008) hypothesized small firms as the dominant drivers of radical innovations that define new fields.

While high technology start-up firms have been credited with contributing to economic growth by way of job creation and innovation (Kirchhoff 1994; Kirchhoff and Spencer 2008), a review of the characteristics of these start-ups reveal that they have a huge failure rate (Stinchcombe 1965). Given these seemingly contradicting observations, one can infer that the contribution to economic development is through those start-up firms that have successfully managed to overcome the challenges during the initial stages of firm life cycle and emerged successful. It is, therefore, appropriate to understand the process and the characteristics of those few start-ups that braved the uncertainty and ambiguity, and challenged and managed to overcome the liability of newness.

The above-mentioned observations also underlie the shift in the focus of entrepreneurship researchers who earlier focused on explaining the phenomenon of start-up life cycle events, such as survival and success from a static perspective, to the now accepted understanding that entrepreneurship is a complex and dynamic process (Wiklund, Patzelt, and Shepherd 2009). This realization is reflected in Gregoire et al. (2006) who indicate seven major areas of convergence within the entrepreneurship literature. Their work illustrates that an entrepreneur as the central agent who initiates actions, firms as the vehicle of the acts of entrepreneurship, behavioural aspects/characteristics of the entrepreneur, firms, and environmental factors (social capital and financial capital) as the influencers form the common tenets of entrepreneurship field.