How do Start-ups Recognize the Value of External Knowledge and Acquire it?

In today’s market-driven world, decision makers in business have to learn from external knowledge in order to improve their responsiveness to the market. The impact of external knowledge has been extensively investigated in established companies but in the context of start-ups this is underexplored. For start-ups the use of external knowledge is crucial due to their liabilities of smallness and newness. Moreover, start-ups also face extreme resource scarcity, high uncertainty and they lack paying customers during early phases of product development. The objective of this paper is to understand how start-ups are learning from external knowledge sources. This requires the investigation of different absorptive capacity dimensions in various organizational stages. Therefore, this study focuses on and unravels the black box of the early core components of absorptive capacity allowing practical insights on how start-ups deal with and learn from external knowledge. This research is based on semi-structured interviews with 16 business-to-business (B2B) start-up entrepreneurs in the early stage of their company. Finally, this paper suggests adding the dimension "access/connection to external knowledge" to the framework by Todorova & Durisin (2007).