The study analyzes how the market overlap between startups founded by former employees of parent organizations affects their performance. The researchers propose that market overlap has a curvilinear relationship with the likelihood of survival of spin-outs. The previous hierarchical position of founders moderates this relationship. Market overlap helps reduce uncertainty, but too much overlap may lead to hostile actions by parent organizations, creating disruptive competition that lowers spin-outs' survival. The study uses European biotech spin-outs and their parent firms as a sample and finds support for the hypotheses.

To persevere, entrepreneurs position actions as continuation of the past, extend timelines and complexify temporal ordering.

For failed crowdfunding projects, more market validation predicts commercialization performance.

Stakeholder constraints can give rise to diminishing returns from pivoting

Can failure of the venture prompt an identity change in the entrepreneur?

How dangerous is dependence on a key customer for a young firm? What can the firm do to manage such dependence?