Critical success factors for technology start-ups: an exploratory qualitative study of experts’ views

Abstract

Technology start-ups are high-growth projects that generate rapid traction and very high returns. However, with this high return potential comes a low success rate. According to Start-up Genome, less than ten percent (10%) of start-ups worldwide succeed with a failure rate of over ninety percent (90%). This study aims to investigate the critical success factors of technology start-ups according to Moroccan experts with a qualitative approach. A review of the literature on the critical success factors of start-ups allowed us to highlight the themes to be addressed through semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 experts and through the analysis of the netnography conducted on the speeches of 8 Moroccan experts. After analyzing the content of our corpus, the results of our study highlight the important role of the characteristics of the start-up ecosystem, the business model innovation, financing, the complementarity of the teams and the entrepreneurial mindset of the founder's profile as factors favoring the success of start-ups. The objective of this scientific article is to study the perception of Moroccan experts on success factors in order to adapt and refine the conceptual model of success factors to the Moroccan context.