Abstract:

Business support services are a key resource that allows entrepreneurs to build their new firms’ capabilities and to improve their strategic and information skills. By means of this kind of services these new firms can improve their performance. This paper analyzes whether entrepreneurs’ needs are adequately satisfied by conventional pools of business support services. To do it, we segment entrepreneurs according to their use of business support services and study, for each group of entrepreneurs, how these services contribute to satisfy new firm’s performance indicators.

Until now, several studies had analyzed the influence of business support services’ use on business performance. While a great part of these studies focused on the supply side of their provision, just a handful had centered on entrepreneurs’ needs related to new firms’ performance. Additionally, no conclusive results regarding whether business support services
cover the needs of entrepreneurs were also observed. For example, whereas some studies showed that entrepreneurs effectively use business support services, others detected a limited use. Further, a positive relation between the use of business support services and the achievement of better business performance was not always evident.