Market-Driving Behavior in Emerging Firms

Among researchers the concept of market orientation has been broadly discussed for many years stimulated above all by the works of Kohli and Jaworski as well as Narver and Slater. These authors managed to define and operationalize the concept of market orientation in different ways and also empirically confirmed a positive performance impact of a company’s market orientation. Likewise it could be shown that for emerging firms market oriented behavior can influence between 20-25% of company success. In addition it has been researched which management measures and which aspects of a company’s culture foster this behavior in young, innovative firms. At the same time it should be noted that especially these young, innovative companies often create new markets with their innovative products and that (potential) customers only learn about the product when it is introduced to the market. It is questionable how a market oriented company can be successful in such a situation. Information cannot be generated from the customer and hence also cannot be disseminated or processed. These doubts form the basis for the idea of a “market-driving behavior“. This is defined as a company’s ability to create or influence markets. To date it is, however, unclear how such a behavior should be designed and under which circumstances it contributes to the success of young, innovative companies This is the focus area of this dissertation by Jesko Neuenburg. Its objective is to research the so called market driving behavior (MDB). Mr.