A importância da relação com os clientes numa start-up
"customer portfolio size has an inverse U-shaped relationship to the number of new products developed and that the more relationally embedded the customer set, the more new products the firm develops. (Moi ici: É o contexto) Dependence stemming from revenue concentration has a negative impact on new product output. Furthermore, the authors find that relational embeddedness can compensate for too small of a customer portfolio and can help offset the negative effects of a highly concentrated portfolio."
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"we argued and found that customer portfolio size has an inverse U-shaped relationship to new product output. In other words, interaction with more external parties may become counterproductive beyond a certain point. It is not simply that “more is better”; there are costs and trade-offs involved in using external relationships for innovation. Transaction costs and limited managerial capacity lead to diminishing and, ultimately, negative returns to the number of relationships.
Although this finding may seem to contradict the basic tenets of open-source innovation, it is consistent with recent research on successful open-source innovation projects. Far from being wide-open communities, successful open-source projects tend to have, at their heart, a small, close-knit group of expert participants."
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"revenue concentration in a customer portfolio hinders new product development "
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"Our results regarding relational embeddedness indicate that the innovation outcomes for firms with a small or highly concentrated customer portfolio are not a foregone conclusion. We found that relational embeddedness not only has a direct, positive impact on new product output but also can compensate for an otherwise suboptimal portfolio. Relational embeddedness is found to have a greater impact the smaller or more concentrated a firm’s customer portfolio. Although still beneficial for firms with a large or well-balanced portfolio, relational embeddedness is not as critical for them."
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"In contrast to the common belief among entrepreneurs, it is not always better to have more customers. Pursuing new customers should be the result of thoughtful consideration of the trade-offs involved in diverting managerial attention from existing customer relationships. Entrepreneurs should have a clear sense of where on the portfolio size continuum their firm operates: Is the number of customers so small that the firm has limited sources of revenue and gets insufficient input into the new product development process, or has the customer set grown so large that it is cumbersome to deal with and managerial attention is spread too thinly to enable learning from customers?"
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"The quality of relationships matters. Our results suggest that the relational embeddedness of a customer portfolio has a positive impact on a firm’s new product output. Close relationships can help the young firm acquire valuable knowledge on, for example, customer needs, market trends, competitors’ offerings, and complementary technologies from customers. Thus, entrepreneurs should treat customer relationships not just as sources of revenue but also as valuable learning opportunities. Closer relationships with customers not only directly help in a firm’s innovation process but also compensate for the negative effects of both dependence and small portfolio size. The implication of these findings is that entrepreneurs should strive to forge closer, more cooperative relationships with customers—particularly if the firm is dependent on key customers or has few customers."
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