Communicatively constituting innovation from tech startup founding stories: motifs, metanarrative and materiality

Purpose Innovation serves as the impetus in organizing tech startups. This study aims to explore how founders articulate and frame the concept of innovation from the founding stories they tell of their tech startups. From the versions of innovation presented through narratives, the study looks at how innovation subsequently influences and structures the tech startup organization. Design/methodology/approach Hinging on the premise that “organization is structured like a narrative” (Cooren, 2000, p. 58), founding stories of ten Filipino tech startup organizations were sourced and analyzed to understand how innovation is characterized, structured and materialized in narratives. The founding stories gathered from the participants underwent thematic analysis (for patterns of meaning and narrative typologies) and structural analysis (on the form that the story takes as well as its common elements) following Greimassian narrative theory (Greimas, 1971, 1987). Findings Eight themes surfaced from the constructed data, typifying different stories of and around innovation, including “the call to venture,” “old ways in new things” and “weathering the storm.” The properties of tech startup innovation derived from the motifs and the resulting metanarrative as well as the materializing of innovation in various narrative encounters told of a process, implying that innovation is constituted in communication. The study highlights that the tech startup organization itself is fashioned by articulations generated by innovation and is thereby accomplished in communication. Originality/value Current literature maintains a persistent ambiguity of defining innovation as well as a limited exploration of how narratives actively shape its materialization. The study contributes to theory by training focus on the mobilizing capacity of innovation, diverging from conventional transmission and diffusion models of innovation. From the context of tech startups as the organization of innovation, the study theorizes on the communicative constitution of innovation.