The Challenges of Routinizing for Building Resilient Startups

While large and established organizations can rely on well‐embedded routines, startups need to first create and maintain them. We refer to this as routinizing. So far, scholars have not yet addressed the challenges of routinizing in young firms and how this relates to their resilience. Routinizing essential‐for‐survival processes can increase a startup’s pre‐adversity resilience, which is an organization’s capability to anticipate, prevent, and mitigate potential adversity prior to its escalation to secure an organization’s existence and prosperity. Based on our qualitative cross‐case analysis, we identify startup‐specific context factors that inhibit routinizing. Moreover, we show that a high perceived routine value is crucial to successfully routinize, and present ways to increase a routine’s perceived value in startups, namely via artifacts and incentives.