Exploring new perspectives of technological and marketing capabilities emergence in high-tech startups

High-tech startups foster economic growth and innovation, even if the pressuring challenges, especially in their first years, impose building up a solid base of capabilities to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Through a systematic literature review, this paper combines concepts from the resource-based view, the dynamic capability perspective, and the contingency theory, to develop a level-based conceptual framework, that categorizes organizational capabilities into zero, first and second-order, each impacting on startups’ outcomes. It reveals the need to balance exploitation and exploration activities to be responsive to market turbulences and support both incremental and radical adjustments, to manage strategic operational changes. The framework provides a theoretically grounded base for understanding the role of marketing and technological capabilities in high-tech startups’ innovation, growth, and survival. It also offers practical insights to successfully follow a capability-driven approach for the long-term success of high-tech startups.