Abstract:

The Valley of Death (VoD) denotes a perilous or transitional period before a new business reaches a breakeven point. It also describes a situation where commercialization projects fail to achieve their goals. VoD has been extensively covered by scholars with extant literature delineating VoD across different industries, including medical, military, and education. Despite this, previous scholarly works are still fragmented and often cover the VoD causes from a specific industry lens. Mindful of the gap in current research, this article provides an extensive literature review of common causes accelerating the VoD transition. The article draws upon reliable academic databases and uses a systematic literature review with thematic analysis method to evaluate 128 sources of literature material from the 600 initially selected. Publication dates of the sources analyzed spanned between June 2000 and June 2020. Findings highlight primary drivers of VoD that included financial gaps or a lack of sufficient funds, infrastructural gaps, low internal and external cooperation, and unsupportive ecosystems (such as bureaucracy). Findings also revealed that the lack of relevant personal and/or professional competences was an equally important cause. Personal and professional competences include, but not limited to, entrepreneurship knowledge or orientation, marketing and technology development skills, human resources, and commercialization skills. Through a deeper understanding of the causes, this literature review serves as a baseline for providing valuable insights to technology and business experts, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurship educators on the necessary elements needed for a new technology make a smooth transition into the market, and how to better equip startups for bridging VoD.

Keywords:

Valley of Death, Startups, Technology-based business.