Setting the P-Start for digital entrepreneurship: an idea-to-company process model integrated with innovation management tools

The relevance of Digital Entrepreneurship is increasingly growing, especially in the context of Innovation Ecosystems. However, little attention has been paid to product/service and business levels of analysis, despite the complex managerial and technological skills required in startup generation processes. Based on technology entrepreneurship and innovation management perspectives, we propose the P-Start approach: an idea-to-company process model integrated with innovation management tools that combines agile methods and stage-gate systems to support the generation of digital startups. The model has been developed for more than six years following an action-research program that involved 12 startups, two universities, and three startup accelerators. Besides proposing the process, this article discusses theoretical and practical implications such as how the process and tools actually helped digital startups; how were they created and adapted throughout the research; and, finally, future studies on processes/tools in the Digital Entrepreneurship context are then proposed.