L’offre de thèse porte sur sur le sujet suivant : ‘La capacité des startups industrielles à gérer une supply chain’.

Co-direction : Marie-Anne Le Dain, laboratoire GSCOP ; Richard Calvi, laboratoire IREGE

Descriptif du sujet :

Start-ups play a key role in introducing innovation technologies in the market (Audretsch et al., 2006). Companies are not able to develop innovation in isolation because the innovation process is complex and non-linear by nature (Chesbrough et al., 2006). But the issue is more critical for start-ups as they differ from established firms regarding many aspects such as their limited resources and capabilities as well as their lack of experience and an organic firm structure (Aldrich and Ruef, 2006; Marcon and Ribeiro, 2021). In this research, we focus on hardware start-ups (DiResta et al., 2015; Budinoff and Kramer, 2022) or industrial start-ups (Harlin and Berglund, 2021) that aim to develop a new physical product while targeting a potential mass distribution through the supply chain. Start-ups usually do not have a formal purchasing organization to manage the supplier relationships (Baraldi et al., 2019).

Most of extant studies in purchasing and supply management focused on the way established firms can buy from start-ups (Homfeldt et al., 2019; Kurpjuweit et al., 2021; Kurpjuweit and Wagner, 2020), but overlooked how start-ups may improve their purchasing practices. While some scholars investigated the purchasing management in SMEs (Ellegaard, 2006), there is a dearth of academic knowledge in the case of start-ups.

This research aims to investigate how start-ups manage their sourcing strategy and their supply chain. The methodology adopted is based on case studies coming from the OSV (Outdoor Sport Valley) and Linksium of Grenoble Alpes incubators.

Case studies aims to identified the success and the failure encountered by practitionners.

This project combines the skills in open collaborative innovation of G-SCOP and those in purchasing management and entrepreneurship of IREGE.