Startup Brand Ontology
“Days of PhD Students” at our Institute for Information Systems (ISI) in Lausanne. Among them, Dina Elikan will present her thesis proposal entitled “An Ontology and a visual tool for designing a Startup Brand”.
“Branding is key at the beginning of a startup’s life. The literature about corporate branding is dense and contains a lot of different typologies. Nevertheless the literature of startup branding is sparse and there are only few models to validate and conceptualize branding in a startup. Brands are an asset to the company, thus they should be well thought of. They are also a strategic way to differentiate a startup from its competitors. And having a well-defined brand allows all the people involved in the startup to communicate the same message to all stakeholders. This project aims to identify the key concepts and relationships in the domain of Startup Branding in order to propose a structured vision and definition of the concept. With this in mind, my research aims to develop a so- called “Startup Brand Ontology” and a visual tool to help startups co-design their brand. With the intention to help them express and communicate a clear vision, image and culture to all their stakeholders.
“This project follows the design science research paradigm, which is widely accepted in information systems (IS) research for designing and evaluating artifacts. The outcomes are the conceptual design of a co-design tool for entrepreneurs to design their corporate branding and its instantiation and evaluation in field studies as well as empirical insights into its utility in real-world situations. Finally, I aim to generalize the findings by means of a formalized design theory, which synthesizes and generalizes the design principles for co-design tools for startup branding in order to add this design theory to the knowledge base as prescriptive knowledge for designing a co-design tool for startup branding.
