Abstract

Innovative high-tech startups play a vital role in knowledge and technology transfer, by focusing on the development, production, and trade of high-technological value products and services. However, the complexity of high-tech environments poses new challenges to the success of high-tech products and customer adoption. Innovative high-tech startups are called to leverage their capability base to obtain a competitive advantage and to understand market needs and trends, competitors’ strategies, and their environments. This study examines the relationships between technological and marketing capabilities to enhance the survival and growth processes of innovative high-tech startups. It employs a systematic literature review (SLR), based on a quasi-automatic keyword extraction through extraction co-occurrence networks of litsearch R package and a final manual screening of 52 articles. The findings reveal the importance of enhancing both technological and marketing capabilities while managing and balancing the trade-offs between short-run incremental innovation activities and long-term radical ones. The contributions are threefold. The paper contributes to the advancements of literature about startups’ survival, innovation, and growth processes, with a focus on the combinative effect of technological and marketing capabilities at the firms’ level. By limiting the analysis to innovative high-tech startups, it considers the higher levels of environmental uncertainty and dynamicity in more technology-intensive industries. Lastly, it advances propositions that may support managers in individuating activities and outcomes to leverage to successfully compete in the global arena. It is important to acknowledge that additional capabilities and mediating factors impacting the transformative mechanisms of higher-order capabilities should be analyzed. Nevertheless, this study represents an initial step for analyzing the interplay between the organizational capabilities of innovative high-tech startups.