Radical business strategy change in high technology new ventures: taking the investor's perspective

Radical Strategic Change (RSC) is not a rare event in high technology new ventures, due to their rapidly changing environment. This research explores investors' perspective regarding RSC in their portfolio companies, using a qualitative study by interviewing a variety of 13 financial investors from 7 countries. Findings present three approaches taken by investors: Avoidance, Readiness and Passive. Since the success of RSC is critical to ventures performance, it is suggested that inventors adopt the readiness approach, optimized also through the prisoners' dilemma as reflecting the investor-investee relationship. Further research is needed to validate findings of this study.