Complementary Product Integration by High-Technology New Ventures: The Role of Initial Technology Strategy
研究高科技新创企业如何通过初始技术战略影响其与互补产品的整合能力，识别三种整合类型，并基于美国软件企业数据验证假设，对创业者有指导意义。
In this paper, we investigate the relationship between complementary product integration and the initial technology strategy of a high-technology new venture. With customers placing considerable emphasis on cross-product integration, the success of a new venture is dependent as much on its ability to integrate its product with relevant complementary products as on the core product functionality itself. We identify three types of complementary product integration: value-added internal, add-on module, and data interface. We argue that the adoption of proactive initial technology strategy critically determines the ability of a high-technology new venture to rapidly and efficiently integrate its product with new and emerging complementary products. More specifically, we offer hypotheses that relate initial design and development strategies to the number and the type of complementary product integrations achieved by a new venture in the initial years. The hypotheses are tested using data from a set of U.S.-based software new ventures. The results support our arguments and imply the need for high-technology new ventures to adopt an explicit complementary product focus during initial product design.