Project Management and Business Start-up: A process based framework

This paper explores the contribution of project management to entrepreneurship development with a specific focus on business start-up projects. More and more the success for the launching a new entrepreneurial ventured depends from many factors, among these, the capacity to organize and manage the complexity of all the activities required to initiate the new venture. Sometimes the entrepreneurs lack the appropriate managerial skills and the business start-up launch is managed without taking in consideration the appropriate methodologies of project management. With the aim to cover this gap, an holistic process oriented framework supporting the business startup projects development adopting the methodologies of project management is presented. The framework mix the phases to initiate a new entrepreneurial act with the area of project management, to support the entrepreneurs involved in such new venture, to afford the complexity and the uncertainty of this particular typologies of nascent organization projects. The innovativeness of the paper relies on the unconventional connection between the literature on project management, and studies of entrepreneurship. The discussion provides contribution to the field of project management, in the attempt to provide a customization of the PM standard for a particular typology of project: business start-up. Implications for practices regard the utilization of the framework by the nascent entrepreneur, by the start-upper, or by the researcher of University students for the launching of a spin off.