Abstract

The radical changes in today’s competitive environment created a “big bang” effect: companies and industries are being disrupted in an unprecedented short time. The challenge has shifted from predicting the unknown or conventional method of venture creation to agile actions, which is to act rapidly before the competition catches up and eliminate any advantage one may have, especially for entrepreneurs and small businesses with significant resource constraints. The objective of this research is to investigate alternative approaches under a time-constrained setting. A recent national open innovation initiative of Finland challenged practitioners and researchers to transform technologies into commercializable innovations in under six months. A high-tech case within the challenge piloted the agile effectuation of a business model with three parallel approaches: effectuation, causation and lean startup method, thus providing antecedent on how effectuation theory can be integrated with agile development and business model theory.