Innovative products and services remain the primary drivers in innovation ecosystems. New ventures emerge in these ecosystems, and the number grows by the day. The leading ecosystems actors appoint the new firms as startups, and usually academics, and young entrepreneurs design and establish these recent ventures. Many studies state that startups impact positively in the economy, contribute to its development, explore new market possibilities by investigating concrete exponential problems. Nevertheless, there is a missing concept of what a startup is, and even among practitioners, there are a plethora of definitions. As a result, it is an emerging standard without an explicit and universal meaning. This matter is also supported by the lack of definition in scientific literature, that does not define and delimit clearly the boundaries and the exact moments that may nominate an enterprise as a startup. Therefore, an explicit definition could support innovation ecosystems actors, like Policy Makers and University and Company Managers to improve the effectiveness of the establishment of startups as the main ecosystems’ output. Hence, this study aims to propose a preliminary and generic definition of startups, using the PLM concept perspective as a starting point, since PLM seeks to improve innovation through managing company’s products across their lifecycles, from the first idea until its discard. To initiate the discussion, we compare the startup and product lifecycles, specially the Beginning of Life (BOL) and Middle of Life (MOL) phases.