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The understanding of how firms create value for their stakeholders is important for advancing the empirical body of knowledge on stakeholder theory. This is especially relevant for the exploration of technology companies operating at different organizational life cycle (OLC) stages. Our study investigates if the use of business-stakeholder engagement models differs among firms at various OLC stages. We have identified three distinct categories of business-stakeholder engagement models from the literature, including: ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR), ‘creating shared value’ (CSV) and ‘creating value for all stakeholders’ (VAS) (Freeman et al., 2010; Strand & Freeman, 2013). Drawing from the stakeholder theory and organizational life cycle (OLC) frameworks, we hypothesize that ‘start-up’ firms are more receptive toward VAS model; ‘growth’ firms toward CSR; and ‘mature’ firms toward CSV. We apply a ‘pragmatist’ worldview (Creswell, 2009) to collect empirical evidence on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) firms. Our analyses include two extensive perception based exploratory studies, described as ‘Phase-1’ and ‘Phase-2’. In the first phase of our exploratory study we use repertory grid technique (Kelly, 1955) to systematically elicit personal constructs from the ICT-sector business experts. We used a partial repertory grid method to interview 18 ICT-sector business experts from Central Canada. Selected sample groups comprised of three scholars and three practitioners from each of the start-up, growth and mature OLC stages. RepGrid and RepSocio features of the Rep 5 enterprise software were used to conduct …