Master’s Dissertation Research Survey

Learning from Nature’s Resilience

A Biomimicry Framework for Building Adaptive Entrepreneurial Ventures in Volatile Markets

Estimated time: 10 to 15 minutes
Eligibility: Founder or co-founder of a venture under three years of operation
Participation: Voluntary and anonymous
Researcher: Petrus C Jansen, Master’s candidate, Eaton Business School

Privacy note: Please do not enter your name, venture name, email address, phone number, address, or any other information that could identify you personally. This survey is intended to collect anonymous responses only.

Questionnaire

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Screening and Demographics

These questions confirm eligibility and describe the participant sample. Please do not provide your name, venture name, email address, or any other identifying information.

Q1. Are you currently a founder or co-founder of a venture under three years of operation?

Q6. Is this your first venture, or have you founded one or more ventures previously?
Q7. Which best describes your founder role?

Biomimicry Resilience Principles

Please answer in relation to your current venture. Use the 1 to 7 scale where 1 means strongly disagree and 7 means strongly agree.

Q8. My venture intentionally cultivates diversity across its revenue streams, customer segments, or markets.

Q9. Our team brings a deliberately wide range of skills, backgrounds, and perspectives.

7
Strongly agree

Q10. We maintain meaningful redundancy in critical capabilities so that no single person or system is a single point of failure.

Q11. We balance our reliance on key partners, suppliers, or platforms against our independence to limit cascading risks.

Q12. Information flows openly inside the team and to our key external stakeholders.

Q13. We routinely run small experiments and use the data to inform strategic decisions.

Q14. Our culture treats failed experiments as legitimate learning rather than as costly mistakes.

Q15. We are willing to pivot the business model substantially when the evidence calls for it.

Q16. Decision-making authority is intentionally distributed in our venture, not concentrated solely with the founders.

Q17. We operate by a set of simple guiding principles that allow people to act without needing to escalate every decision.

Q18. We are comfortable with outcomes that emerge from the interactions of the team rather than from top-down planning.

Q19. Multiple, independent voices, such as advisors, investors, customers, or partners, genuinely shape our venture’s direction, not only the founders.

Q20. Leadership is encouraged to emerge at multiple levels of the organisation, not only from the top.

Q21. Our hiring and partnership practices actively seek diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

Q22. We involve customers and external collaborators in co-creating our products or services.

Q23. We invest deliberately in slow-moving assets, such as brand, culture, and long-term customer trust, even when short-term pressures push otherwise.

Q24. We track signals about these slow-moving variables and use them in strategic decisions.

Q25. Our venture has grown its customer base faster than comparable competitors.

Q26. Our venture has grown its revenue faster than comparable competitors.

Q27. Our venture has achieved stronger profitability, or a stronger path to profitability, than comparable competitors.

Q28. Our venture has been more effective at attracting and retaining talent than comparable competitors.

Q29. Overall, our venture has performed well over the past 12 months.

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