RESEARCH OVERVIEW ABOUT COMPETENCIES OF STARTUPS

Front the current scenario of scientific research about startups, the question that this study focuses on answering is: “How is the current research panorama of competencies used in ventures classified as startups?” To answer the research problem described, the general objective of this study is: (i) to show the current research panorama about startup competencies. As a secondary objective: (ii) to map the main competencies of startups present in the literature. The scientific gap that this work seeks to response is create a competency framework for early-stage enterprises, in this case, startups. A group of competencies of startups operationalized in the literature were founded and can guide the theoretical framework of future works about the startup business environments, the association with their life cycle and main research themes.

The database was did to help the systematic review according to these principles [1]: (i) create a research problem that guides the research; (ii) choose the aspect to be analyzed in the literature; (iii) filter the collected data according to their relevance to the research problem; and (iv) analyze and interpret the data. The databases chosen were "Scopus" and "Web of Science" taking into account the areas "business", "business finance", "economics" and "management" in the Web of Science, and "business, management and accounting" and “economics, econometric and finance” in the Scopus. The research was carried out between January and April 2020 and January 2022. The choice for these databases occurred due to their databases contain most relevant journals in these areas in the literature [2,3].

There was no predetermined period of time in this research, but the authors only considered publications that used “blind review” process by peers. The authors used the keywords “startups”, “startup capabilities”, “startup competence”, “startup competencies” and “competencies” to collect the data and obtain the largest possible number of publications about the subject proposed. A total of 1,953 scientific articles published between 1938 and 2021 were found. Firstly, the authors excluded works that had duplication between the two platforms (the same work appearing on both) or that had no relationship with the area of administration, reducing the number of scientific articles to 1,205 published between 1976 and 2021. Next, works that did not specifically deal with topics related to startups were excluded, obtaining 148 articles published between 1996 and 2021. Finally, works that did not deal with startup competencies were excluded, obtaining 71 articles published between 2000 and 2021, that were described in detail in the database.

In a bibliometric view, the articles described in this data base were classified according to descriptive (most cited journals, country of origin and year of publication) and methodological (research method) characteristics; in addition to the results (main research topic) and citations (most cited journals). All selected articles were managed by this database plotted in Microsoft Excel with the reference of each publication and its basic information (abstract, keywords, database, type of study and so on). From the reading of the selected papers, the main competences related to startups were mapped and identified.