Research in new ventures' nonmarket strategies: contributions and opportunities

New ventures need nonmarket strategies for addressing resource limitations, scaling requirements, and size/age liabilities. New ventures' objectives, limitations, and liabilities differentiate them from large companies and make nonmarket strategies more critical for them. The scholarly interest in nonmarket strategies of new ventures has also increased during the last decades. However, despite the increasing number of empirical studies investigating new ventures' nonmarket strategies in various contexts, one cannot identify any systematic review on the topic. This article addresses this gap to gain a broader perspective of new ventures’ nonmarket strategies in different economic and industrial contexts. The paper identified four types of new ventures' nonmarket strategies by systematically reviewing the extant literature: social signaling, sociopolitical networking, legitimacy building, and balancing. The study employed the “Gioia” methodology for data analysis. It mapped studies over three primary startup objectives, arguing significant tendencies and gaps in research on new ventures' nonmarket strategies. Results indicate that empirical articles outnumber conceptual studies and often overlook the impact of contexts, such as an industry's maturity and the country's economic development. Researchers focused more on political strategies in developing countries and social strategies in developed countries. They studied sociopolitical networking and legitimacy-building strategies for managing dependencies and fast scaling. They also studied “social signaling,” mainly in mature industries, and “balancing” in nascent industries. Future research would benefit from comparative studies across nascent and mature industries in developed and developing countries for a broader range of nonmarket strategies and new venture objectives. We recommend that scholars embrace a higher sensitivity to new ventures' contextual intricacies.