دست به کار شدن: راهبردهای بازاریابی برای نوآوری های الکترونیکی شروع به کار Get the show on the road: Go-to-market strategies for e-innovations of start-ups

1. Introduction The ongoing digitization process presents intriguing market opportunities for start-ups, which are new business ventures that develop and launch innovations based on entrepreneurial ideas (Heirman & Clarysse, 2007; Loch, Solt, & Bailey, 2008). As a result, an ever-increasing amount of e-innovations (EIs)1 is flooding the markets (Huang & Rust, 2013). EIs are Internet-enabled service innovations that offer new and unique value propositions via the Internet (Dotzel, Shankar, & Berry, 2013), where they first emerge. For instance, the online cloud service Dropbox, launched in 2008, was such an EI. Dropbox provided a new and unique value proposition that was commercially enabled by and emerged on the Internet. This study differentiates EIs from new Internet-based services, such as online travel booking or online classifieds, that solely involve offline services provided online and for which the value proposition does not first emerge on the Internet. By definition, EIs are either radically or incrementally new to the firm and customers. Although a proliferation of EIs exists in the B2B context, this study’s focus is on the B2C context, where the growth of EIs continues to soar (Hirt & Willemott, 2014). Despite the growing relevance of EIs, up to 90% of EIs fail (Marmer, Herrmann, Dogrultan, & Berman, 2011), which is not surprising given that the adoption of EIs implies high levels of uncertainty for potential customers, especially when start-ups launch EIs. Several characteristics inherent in EIs provided by start-ups cause this uncertainty, such as their digital nature (Featherman & Pavlou, 2003), impersonality (Dimoka, 2010), intangibility (Huang & Rust, 2013), and newness (Meuter & Ostrom, 2000), as well as unfamiliarity of the launching company (McKnight, Choudhury, & Kacmar, 2002). This uncertainty finds expression in privacy concerns and fear of data misuse (Featherman & Pavlou, 2003; Ha & Stoel, 2009; Sheehan & Hoy, 2000) and in doubts regarding performance (Featherman & Pavlou, 2003; Meuter & Ostrom, 2000). Customers seek to reduce their perceived uncertainty by using the information provided about EIs (Huang & Rust, 2013). A start-up’s goto-market strategy makes such information available. Prior research shows that the go-to-market strategy largely determines innovation failure or success (Avlonitis, Papastathopoulou, & Gounaris, 2001; Langerak, Hultink, & Robben, 2004; Lee, Lin, Wong, & Calantone, 2011). Therefore, this study focuses on the challenge of designing go-tomarket strategies as effective information signals for customers when launching EIs.