What Drives Venture Studios Success? Uncovering Successful Configurations in the European Landscape

Abstract

This study investigates the emerging phenomenon of Venture Studios, organizations that systematically create and launch multiple startups, operating as "startup factories". While their global presence has expanded significantly, academic research on Venture Studios, and particularly on the factors driving their success, remains limited. In fact, existing literature has primarily focused on comparing Venture Studios to established Entrepreneurial Support Organizations (ESOs) and analysing their heterogeneity. To address this research gap, this study employs Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to identify the configurations of factors that lead Venture Studios to success. Leveraging a publicly available Venture Studio database and a funnelled sampling strategy, our analysis focuses on 25 European Venture Studios founded between 2009 and 2014. Building upon theoretical sampling, we examine configurations arising across five critical conditions influencing their performance at micro, meso, and macro level: founders’ entrepreneurial experience, industry specialization degree, external affiliation, international orientation, and geographic positioning within entrepreneurial ecosystems. The outcome, Venture Studios success, is defined as the ratio of successful exits achieved by a studio's startups divided by its lifetime. Our results reveal four distinct configurations leading to Venture Studio success, confirming the heterogeneity of Venture Studios, and finding that multiple pathways to performances. Previous founding experience emerges as a predominant condition, appearing in three of the four successful configurations and never being absent. Also, a compensatory relationship between specialization and location is observed, suggesting that deep domain expertise can offset geographical disadvantages and that generalist studios can leverage their advantageous positioning. These results contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial support organizations and portfolio entrepreneurship by conceptualizing Venture Studios as an institutionalized form of portfolio entrepreneurship. The study provides also actionable insights for aspiring founders, investors, and policymakers, emphasizing the importance of considering interdependent factors for Venture Studio development and success.