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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of founding team experience (industry and venturing) in new venture creation. This paper posits the following questions: How does founding team experience influence the likelihood of new venture creation, in the nascent stage? How does industry context moderate this relationship? The study aims to fill an important gap in the literature by unpacking the impact of different types of founding team experiences on venture outcome, and by focusing on the influence of founding team in the venture creation process, specifically at the nascent stage.

The paper utilizes data from the Second Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, a longitudinal data set of 1,214 nascent entrepreneurs in the USA. Logistics regression was employed to analyze the effect of founding team experience on new venture creation. Post hoc analysis was conducted to ensure the confidence of the findings.

The paper provides empirical insights about how founding team experience influences the likelihood of new venture creation in the nascent stage. At the nascent stage, founding team industry experience positively affects new venture creation while founding team venturing experience does not. However, in the high-technology industry environment, the influence of the founding team’s venturing experience on new venture creation is stronger than that in the low-technology industry environment.

Due to the design of the data set, there is a risk of “right-censoring” problem. Also, because the study used archival data on founding teams, the methodology did not allow for uncovering the underlying team processes and dynamics during the venture creation process based on learning from experience. Future studies are encouraged to examine other types of founding team experience and the underlying process-level factors on venture creation.

The paper provides important practical implications for nascent entrepreneurs/entrepreneurial teams on team assembling and composition. In general, a team with higher-level industry experience is critical for venturing success. A team with higher-level venturing experience is more desired in the high-technology industry.

This paper fulfills an important gap in the entrepreneurial team literature by highlighting the complex and nuanced ways in which founding team experience influences the likelihood of venture creation in the nascent stage of the firm, especially after incorporating the additional impact of the industry context.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the characteristics of an entrepreneurial team that influence the likelihood a new venture will successfully launch.

This paper uses a sample of prospective start‐up banks that applied for a charter application in Florida between 1996 and 2005. Logistic regression was used to test the hypotheses.

Analysis suggests that entrepreneurial teams where: the CEO is strongly embedded into the team; no team member holds 10 per cent or more of the firm's total equity; team members have less rather than more industry experience; and more team members have prior founding experience, all point to a successful new venture launch.

This study focuses on start‐up success in a single industry and thus may not be generalizable to other research contexts.

Results suggest that bank regulators in charge approving new bank charters would be well advised to revisit their guidelines and recommendations for prospective new bank founders.

Given the unique regulatory requirements of the US banking industry, the successful as well as failed efforts to launch a new bank can be identified and the “success bias” present in many entrepreneurship studies can be averted.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understanding the impact of entrepreneurial team composition on new venture performance. Different types of entrepreneurship motivation among founding team members are defined. Using a relatively recent theory as a framework (i.e. self-determination theory), the authors group these motives into two categories: autonomous and controlled motivation. The business impact of the level of each type of motivation within the team, as well as the impact of having team members with different motivational drivers, is examined. New venture performance is modelled in two different ways: financial performance (i.e. return on assets) and innovation performance.

The analyses are based on 66 founding teams active in diverse activity sectors. The teams represent a total of 142 business founders. Data was collected through structured interviews, a company questionnaire and a secondary data source (i.e. certified financial statements).

The results confirm that the level of autonomous motivation within the team contributes to start-up financial performance, whereas the level of controlled motivation hampers innovation performance. No direct effects of diversity of team member motivation on start-up performance were discovered.

This is one of the first papers to study multiple firm performance effects of the composition of entrepreneurial founding teams in terms of motivation.

This paper brings in relevant entrepreneurial behavior theory to understand the ownership decisions founders make during the nascent stage of new venture creation, and how such decisions impact the viability of the firm.

The authors examine the behavior and decision making of 137 lead founders during the nascent stage of new venture creation. Psychological ownership and environmental uncertainty are measured of lead founders when dividing up firm ownership among the founding team. Using a longitudinal approach, these nascent-stage decisions are then analyzed to understand the impact on the new venture one year later.

Counter to prior research suggesting teams are better off with identical wages and ownership, the authors find such harmony (i.e. “kumbaya”) pursuit to be a detriment to new venture emergence. Specifically, this study finds that nascent ventures are better off with an unequal ownership split among the founding team members. These findings suggest that nascent firms with an unequal split are more likely to move beyond the nascent stage and launch a functional business.

Although the results of this study offer a valuable contribution to lead founders and new businesses, the study looked at each startup independent of another and is therefore not able to draw any conclusions related to competitiveness.

Lead founders and founding teams frequently divide ownership evenly among the founders. This paper shows that, while convenient, the decision to divide ownership equally can hamper a nascent firm as it moves toward the launch phase of the startup process. These results should motivate founders to think deeply regarding the ownership structure decision and, at the very least, consider the possible negative costs associated with the pursuit of founding team unity.

While scholars have brought attention to the nascent stage, few have identified and analyzed the decisions that take place during this critical time of the new venture development process. Furthermore, even is less is known of the impact nascent decisions have on startup launch. This study sheds light on these areas.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare what criteria novice and habitual entrepreneurs use while adding members to the founding team.

This paper uses conjoint analysis (CA) to provide the order of preference for the “choice attributes.” The logic of CA is that even if two or more attributes influence the choice, it is unlikely that those attributes will have equal importance for founders with different entrepreneurial experiences.

This paper found a significant difference in the ranking of the attributes by novice and habitual entrepreneurs. In novice entrepreneurs, the effect of direct ties in the form of kinship ties has the highest preference, followed by prior social contact and prior work relations. However, personal friendships and resource dependency received lesser importance than interpersonal attraction because of the similarity in vision, beliefs and values. Habitual entrepreneurs, however, valued resource dependency and prior work relations more than kinship ties. Also, unlike novice entrepreneurs, habitual entrepreneurs sought cofounders from their indirect ties.

There has been an explosion of interest and funding for programs that help entrepreneurs establish a cofounding team. The authors inform these programs related to the decision concerning assisting novice and habitual entrepreneurs.

While prior studies examined a single attribute at a time, the strength of this study lies in simultaneously tapping all attributes, along with multiple indicators for each attribute. Additionally, this study distinguishes the selection criteria of cofounders based on the entrepreneurial expertise of the lead founder.

The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the existing literature on entrepreneurial teams (ET) by taking a multi-disciplinary viewpoint and provide a future research agenda based on the identified themes and trends.

A systematic literature review (SLR) was undertaken using “business source complete”. Further scrutiny and application of exclusion criteria led to a final sample consisting of 139 papers from 27 different journals belonging to not just entrepreneurship and strategic management but also other disciplines like OB, finance, sociology, psychology, etc. Using qualitative thematic analysis, the authors identified 11 major themes.

The paper reviews both the eleven themes and the linkages between the themes. Thereby identifying areas that have been understudied and those that have received comparatively more attention. The review revealed that the research stream possesses certain conceptual and methodological concerns apart from its cross-sectional and primarily bivariate nature. Five such main concerns have been identified and discussed in detail. Other elements of the resulting research agenda include calls for more clinical process-oriented research, further attention to context, shifting the level of analysis, and a need to integrate across disciplines.

This paper incorporates a broad insight of ET across academic disciplines to show how future contributions could benefit by incorporating research from other fields. In doing so, provides a starting point for more nuanced discussions around the interrelationships between the different conversations that are taking place in the ET literature.

Employee entrepreneurship has recently become an emerging area of investigation. However, due to the fragmentation of the turnover and entrepreneurship literature, no coherent theoretical framework has been developed to provide an adequate description of the employee entrepreneurial process. The purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of why and how an employee in an established organization progresses toward starting a new venture by exploring the key decision-making processes during the initial stages of employee entrepreneurship.

This study addresses the following research questions: What are the key decision-making processes during the initial stages of employee entrepreneurship? How are these decisions made, and how do they interact? This study employed a multiple case study approach, which enabled the authors to gain valuable insight into these “what” and “how” questions. The data consist of 28 in-depth employee entrepreneurship cases.

Based on an in-depth study of 28 cases, this study constructs a comprehensive model of the dynamic and interactive decision-making processes that lead to employee entrepreneurship. In particular, the findings reveal that rather than being a linear staged activity, employee entrepreneurship is an inherently iterative process that involves a set of interrelated subdecision-making processes related to turnover, team entrepreneurship and partner recruitment that entail multiple iterations and feedback loops based on an individual's cognitive judgment.

By illustrating and clarifying the importance of the effects of different initial motivations and the attributes of the network in the course of the employee entrepreneurship decision-making process, this study integrates the turnover and entrepreneurship literature and makes significant contributions to the current literature on employee entrepreneurship. Moreover, this study complements research investigating entrepreneurial team formation by providing a detailed understanding of how the lead entrepreneur and the prospective partner make mutual choices during the entrepreneurial team formation process.

Entrepreneurship literature has not sufficiently explored the process of how, at different points in time, different members of the co-founding team emerge as leaders. The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the phenomenon of shared leadership emergence process amongst co-founders in entrepreneurial teams.

The study adopted a qualitative approach. 21 co-founders from 7 entrepreneurial teams participated in the study. In-depth interviews were conducted. The data were analysed using Nvivo 11 software.

The study elaborates the process model of shared leadership emergence. The study found that shared interpersonal cognition and trust amongst the co-founders lead to claiming and granting of leadership. The findings also illustrate various strategies used by co-founders to emerge as leaders.

The findings provide key insights to entrepreneurial teams by illuminating what kind of leadership dynamics should be developed, right from the initial stages of the venture. Also, the findings would be beneficial to investors, mentors and coaches of the entrepreneurial teams and ventures, by highlighting team dynamics to be considered before making any investment or team development decisions.

The inductive approach adopted in the study helps in understanding the process of shared leadership emergence in entrepreneurial teams, which is not adequately answered by previous studies. The study extends both shared leadership and entrepreneurship literature by providing a process theory of leadership emergence.

This paper aims to focus on the role of team and entrepreneurial experience for firm performance of serial entrepreneurs in the multi‐media industry.

The research assumes that serial entrepreneurs have certain advantages over novice entrepreneurs, such as the development of effective start‐up teams and entrepreneurial experience effects. Disadvantages, however, are also mentioned in the literature, and these are assumed to out‐balance the advantages, leading to mixed research findings. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 52 European multimedia companies.

The results show a positive impact of relevant entrepreneurial experience and evidence both team advantages as well as disadvantages. Team diversity had a positive impact on performance while the extent of repeated partnerships (or relative team stability) had a negative impact on performance. Moreover, entrepreneurial experience helps to build better diverse teams but has no impact on repeated partnerships.

The degree of experience of serial entrepreneurs in the same industry matters, and suggests that more experience is better. The findings challenge a general assumption about serial entrepreneurs: that the building of superior teams creates performance differences. Team diversity drives performance and the study could also show that habitual entrepreneurs are better in building diverse teams (through a positive moderation of team diversity by entrepreneurial experience). However, relying heavily on previous partners is counter‐productive. Limitations of this study are due to self‐reported data, small sample size and survivor bias.

Entrepreneurs need to focus on opportunities and resource needs linked to these opportunities, and use their experience to build stronger teams but to resist the temptation of replicating perceived past success formula by over‐relying on previous partners. The latter is also important for stakeholders in the entrepreneurial venture.

This paper tests various assumptions and propositions about serial entrepreneurship that are rarely based on sound evidence. The role of entrepreneurial experience to build better diverse teams and the role of repeated partnerships constitute an original contribution to habitual entrepreneurship research.

This paper aims to dismantle the idea that sex per se explains entrepreneurial outcomes and demonstrates the influence of a gendered motivation on forging and shaping new venture teams, which is a disruptive choice affecting the future of start-ups.

A two-level research model is validated on data from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (PSED II), with a system of simultaneous equations. First, if team features affect the performance of new ventures is tested; then, the study investigates determinants of team features with a focus on sex and motivation of nascent entrepreneurs.

Human capital (HC) in terms of education and experience of team members consistently explains venture evolution only when considering the larger team of affiliates. The HC gathered by nascent entrepreneurs is not because of the simplistic sex condition, but rather to a gendered motivation related to the inferior need of achievement of women.

Limitations of discretionary scoring assigned to items of the PSED II survey are present, but unavoidable when processing qualitative data.

Women need to be (culturally) educated on how to re-balance their personal motivation towards entrepreneurship by fostering their incentives for achievement. Political and educational programmes could trigger success in the creation of new businesses led by women.

This paper contributes to the literature on nascent entrepreneurship, focusing on the entrepreneurial teams in the initial phase of business creation, and provides the basis for further studies aimed at eradicating the stereotypes of gender roles that lead women to self-exclusion and organizational errors.