I have chosen to start a new business with the New Parents’ Essential product. Initiating a business with an innovative product like the New Parents’ Essential is tantamount to entering the market with a new organizational form. This seems to pose two main challenges.

The first challenge would be to face environmental selection in the midst of the competition between all the various organizational forms that sell infant related products. We have to make sure our organizational form can best attract customers so that we can survive and thrive amongst all the other organizations.

The second challenge we face will be the lack of legitimation. Since our products are really new and innovative, our organizational form may lack a general sense of social acceptance whereby customers are not sure if they really want or need our products. When our organizational form is new and legitimation is low, it may also be hard to get critical resources such as employees, investors and customers.

To address the first problem, market research would have to be done to first understand which organizational forms are thriving in the market and which forms are not. It is important to understand the organizational environment and what are the key characteristics of a desirable organizational form before determining what types of strategies and methods to implement. One key information that is important is the environmental carrying capacity and we will make sure that the population is not saturated with organizations that are competing for the same resources. Having understood the organizational ecology, we can then decide how to differentiate and market ourselves in the most effective way.

We recognize that founding rates in a given population of organizations are a function of the number of existing organizations of the same form. This leads us to tackling our second challenge. We know that if we are the sole and first startup to carry out a new organizational form, we will not have legitimacy. This could be detrimental to our organizational survival. We would therefore, engage several related organizations such as hospitals to co-invest in our products and get them to start using and promoting our products. We may also sell the patent to some interested organizations so that they too can start selling New Parents’ Essential products. When these organizations promote and sell our products, they adopt the same organizational form as our startup and this would cause our organizational form to be increasingly accepted.

Once we have established contracts and agreements with these organizations, we would be confident to start the new business because there would now be other credible organizations with the same form that helps establish our legitimacy. However, we acknowledge this may also increase competition if too many organizations with the same form emerge. Therefore, we will be prudent in how many and which organizations we would want to work, so as to make sure we do not have too many of the same organizational forms in the population.

Now to determine what type of strategy to adopt, we would need to find out some statistical information on how many newborns there were over the past few years and personalized information on how many parents are willing to buy specialized infant equipment. All these information will tell us how environmentally stable we are in terms of acquiring resources. If the information we receive tells us that parents are consistently receptive and in demand of infant products and that statistics in birth rates are consistently high, then we would probably adopt a specialist strategy and focus only on the needs and wants of new parents. This mean we would select only a niche market to work on and our products would be designed and engineered specially only for the taste of new parents.

However, if we find that the environment is not very stable, we may have to adopt a more generalist strategy approach and have less specialized designs for our products such that we may target not just parents but other potential customers like child care centers as well.

Ultimately, a detailed analysis of the organizational ecology would need to be conducted before deciding when and where to enter the market. It is important to understand our customers and competitors’ before deciding which strategies we could adopt that would be most effective for our survival.