| Abstract | The creation of new business is one of the strategic initiatives that global corporations use to achieve growth. The creation of a new corporate venture from the definition process to execution is a complex process involving feasibility studies, strategic planning, and investment analyses as well as a commitment from corporate management. To ensure the successful conceptualization, planning and implementation of new ventures, corporations need to ensure that the management teams of the new ventures are competent and follow the structures and policies set by the corporations. New ventures need to acquire resources and build capabilities to execute a strategy. They also need to apply skills, tools, techniques and procedures to new project activities. Sustaining new ventures requires an entrepreneurial competency within the venture. Strategies to sustain the new venture could come from the corporation’s structural context or from the strategic context of the new venture. The new venture’s management needs to understand that innovation and strategic initiative processes need to take place to enable the new organization to sail through the competitive seas. New ventures in most emerging market economies are facing challenges. There are concerns about relatively low productivity, a lack of innovation, a lack of capital availability, a lack of skilled labor, and more importantly, unclear policies or poor implementation of policies by the government that increase the risks of managing projects in these markets. While emerging economies present many opportunities, they involve many risks. One particular risk is the complexity involved in negotiations with host governments. Regardless of these challenges, new ventures will have to perform and deliver results for shareholders. There is substantial literature on various aspects of new ventures, such as their formation, processes, and outcomes. Yet, most studies are done in the developed economy context. Further, there is scanty literature on the venture sustenance process. Thus, there is a research gap in terms of the knowledge on emerging economies. This research takes current process studies in the developed market as a departure point and adapts them to the very different context of emerging markets, to fill the knowledge gap for emerging economies. This research also further develops the venture creation process to cover the sustenance process. The central question for this research is “What are the processes of new venture creation and sustenance in emerging economies”? The purpose of this case research is to discover the process how new ventures in emerging economies are created and sustained. The research aims to reach an understanding of the “process”, as well as the “whys” and “hows” of new venture creation and sustenance. Four financial service ventures from four countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, were selected for this research. The reasons for the focus of this study on financial service ventures are that they perform important role in the economy. They involve the mobilization and allocation of investment capital as well as providing the ability for firms to access funds which are the lifeblood of economic strength and well being. The screening criterion was to shortlist the targeted ventures that were wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporations, in selected countries, at the time of selection. In each case, the creation and sustenance process was identified using various available data that included interviews with a number of individuals from organizations in each case study. This led to an understanding of the key activities involved in the creation and sustenance processes. The knowledge gained from each case was further examined and analyzed. Finally, the information gain from targeted cases was compared in order to create a process model for venture creation and sustenance for the context of emerging economies. The research design is qualitative in nature. It follows the “methodological” philosophical assumption which is “characterized as inductive, emerging from, and shaped by, the researcher’s experience in collecting and analyzing the data” (Creswell, 2003). To empirically achieve a generalization from an outcome and develop a proposition and a theory, this case research was designed as a multiple-case study. To ensure the robustness and external validity, the final research results took a holistic view, in which each case was a single unit of analysis that represented the outcome and literal replication. Evidence from multiple cases makes the overall study compelling. In order to increase reliability, this research follows the protocol which was developed before the field visit for data collection. The protocol consists of an case study background, case questions, ethical field procedures, and the direction for case reporting. This research follows Yin’s (2003) three principles of data collection: “use of multiple sources of evidence, the creation of a case study database and maintaining a chain of evidence. These three principles of data collection increased the reliability of the case study. This case research relies on theoretical propositions and examines rival explanations and applies the techniques of pattern matching and chronology analysis, which are a part of the time-series analysis, and a cross case synthesis” (Yin, 2003). The data analysis followed Eisenhardt (1989) in that the case analysis involves detailed case study write-ups for each case. “These write-ups are pure descriptions but they are central to the generation of insight because they help the researcher to cope early in the analysis process with the enormous volume of data” (Eisenhardt, 1989). Once the within-case analysis was done for each case, a “cross-case synthesis technique”, (Yin, 2003; Eisenhardt, 1989), was used to analyze multiple cases together. This aimed to aggregate findings across a series of individual studies. The pattern derived from the case relied on theoretical propositions and was compared across the four cases to determine a common pattern. To refine emerging patterns, tables outlining key activities were used for each case. One table for the venture creation process and another for the venture sustenance process were compared. Each case report included the similarities and differences between the activities of the two processes. For the cross-case analysis, tables were compared among the four cases. By comparing the venture creation process, an integrated process for the creation of ventures was derived. The same process was done with tables containing key activities for the sustenance process from which the integrated venture sustenance process was derived. The final step was to compare the derived integrated venture creation process and sustenance process and to synthesize a final “integrated process model of venture creation and sustenance”. The findings from these cases suggest that “the creation and sustenance of new ventures in emerging economies follow a planned corporate strategy executed by an entrepreneurial corporate management. The successful creation and sustenance is critically based on an entrepreneurial leadership of the new venture that is characterized by the following capacities: autonomy in decision making; mobilizing required resources and support from corporate management through a complex series of political interactions; strategic building; networking with regulators and industry bodies; championing organizational evolution and building a successful organizational learning competency”. The findings from these cases reveal some special “processes” that are unique to emerging economies: the creation process of the new ventures followed the corporation’s vision and strategic initiatives to expand or diversify its activity to complete its offering and to take advantage of a growing market; the involvement from the top management of the corporation was critical to the success of the newly created venture; and both the corporation’s management and the new venture’s management needed to be entrepreneurial in nature. The findings from these case studies also reveal some special “contextual factors” that are unique to emerging economies. The regulatory factor for example, is critical to the creation and sustenance of new ventures. Another example is that the management characteristics in the new venture in an emerging economy needs to include an entrepreneurial leadership that has autonomy in decision making, as well as the political skills required to negotiate with the host government. Lastly, all three levels of the venture’s management perform multiple key activities, or multi-tasking; and that group leaders play cooperative and conformist roles within the structural context. This behavior could be a cultural aspect of employees in Asia, who tend to conform to the rules. They tend to follow the leaders rather than risk questioning and challenging the rules, as opposed to the behavior of managers in the developed economies. This cultural aspect requires further study to validate whether or not it is a general phenomenon in Asia or a possible shared characteristic of ventures in emerging economies. |