Establishment of Start-Up’s Identity as Strategy for Maintaining Business Continuity

Study about reason why start-ups fail has shown that internal issues become the most likely cause of failure. An indication that people within the organization have a difficulty to establish strong sense of identity as the foundation of start-up’s continuity in the long run. Previous studies mentioned how establishment of distinct and understandable identity influence many aspects starting from decision making to recognition by customers. Thus, the aim of this study is to analyse the way of thinking from start-up founders in establishing their start-up identity and construct model that can be applied by other founders. This paper using qualitative method to investigate an in-depth reason of “why” and “how” such phenomenon happen by interviewing 15 start-up owners in Indonesia to gain deeper understanding about how start-up owners establish their identity. By using start-ups’ perspective of value creation to answer questions within Law of Identity model used in this study. The result of this study is a comprehensive step by step model along with questions that can be answered by start-ups founder to establish their identity based on the value they hold. The new model developed in this study are expected to help start-up’s founder establish their identity easier and can be understood by all members within the organization.