Market Orientation of Startups:A Challenge to 'Startup India' Implementation.

Abstract

The much-anticipated 'Start-Up India' initiative was launched to catalyze the growth of entrepreneurship in India. Though the factors like governance issues and challenges from established corporates are mostly highlighted as the hurdles faced by startups on their race to achieve scales, the startup’s own market orientation, a key decider of its future scalability go unnoticed. This paper analyzed the market orientation of interns incubated in Kerala, which was one among the first movers in the startup sector in the country. The researcher adopted one stage cluster sampling method in the study wherein the total population of 39 startups were taken from the 3 natural clusters, incubators under Kerala Startup Mission and their representatives were surveyed and the data was subjected to Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis ( CFA) and weighted means of identified factors. The findings drawn from the study suggests that the startups are low on most key dimensions of market orientations which is a crucial challenge to the success of the startup policy of the country.