Venturing

Technology-based ventures provide an
important route for successful technology transfer [1], [2].
Their founders are supported in successful technology
commercialization by innovation intermediaries [3].
Accordingly, the performance of an innovation system, at
least to some extent, depends on the efficiency of these
intermediaries in terms of the impact of their scarce
resources on the survival and growth of technology-based
ventures. To increase their efficiency, intermediaries
typically optimize their “intake” by requesting a formal
business plan to base their selection on as a hygiene factor
[4]–[7]. Thus, some scholars argue that written business
plans show significant distortion as being produced only to
attract support from innovation intermediaries [6], [8].
Accordingly, they rarely serve for these addressees as a
source of information for analyzing the strengths and
weaknesses of ventures, in order to derive actionable
conclusions and more effectively support ventures [9], [10].
Addressees search for different indicators in business
plans for their evaluation [11]. The descriptions of these
indicators only evince little empirical proof for the
performance of technology-based venture’s [8], [12]. This
gap is herein addressed, in contrast to the lacking
empirical insight, as the most frequently produced artifact
of early-stage technology ventures is at the same time a
written business plan [10], [13]. This paper addresses this
gap by conceptualizing transaction relations described in
the written business plan as a means for working around
the inevitable inaccuracies and uncertainties that delimit
the explanatory abilities [14] of the snapshot model [10]
presented by a business plan. Using a qualitative content
analysis, we derive from the descriptions of transaction
relations in a written business plan valid indicators for the
maturity of the venture’s value-network in different
dimensions [15]. To this extent, this paper presents the
findings from a pre-study that was conducted based on a
sample of forty business plans from an overall population
of 800 business plans in a longitudinal sample from one of
Europe’s most active innovation systems, the regional
State of Baden-Württemberg. Such findings may be used
by innovation intermediaries to enhance their efficiency,
by enabling these to not only derive individual support
strategies for business acceleration but also to analyze the
impact of support measures by reliably monitoring
maturity progress in venture activities.