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We advance entrepreneurship research by developing a theoretical model of how founding teams form. Our neo-Carnegie model situates nascent founders in particular network-structural milieus, engaging in aspiration-driven search for and evaluation of prospective co-founders. The formation of co-founding ties between nascent founders can be divided into four theoretical steps, which we label activation, evaluation, approach, and reciprocation. Successful founding team formation is a consequence of mutually favorable evaluations by nascent founders in a multi-sided matching process. Nascent founders with higher and less flexible aspirations are more likely to undertake distant search for co-founders by seeking referrals, forming ties with strangers, and forming new ties to social foci where they might meet potential co-founders. Churn in newly formed founding teams emerges as a consequence of shifting dominant coalition dynamics in the founding team caused by organic venture evolution and intentional changes in strategic direction. Our theoretical model provides new insights on the formation pathways of founding teams, their initial task and relational resource endowments, and initial team dynamics.

In pursuit of socio-economic growth, scholars and policymakers in emerging economies continues to show interest in understanding technology-based start-up (i.e. tech start-up) emergence, to help mitigate persistent failure experienced during commercialization. Howbeit, some scholars lamented that extant studies that investigated tech start-up emergence are mostly fragmented, because they focus on specific event/sub-process in tech start-up gestation. Thus, this study aims to conduct a systematic literature review to discover, harmonize and develop a framework that describes the interaction among varying dimensions of events/sub-processes that characterizes tech start-up emergence in an emerging economy.

To conduct this study, the authors engaged a concept-centric systematic literature review. Having developed a search protocol, the authors searched through information systems database, and other relevant discipline databases, to select relevant articles for review.

The systematic review revealed various dimensions of events (i.e. opportunity discovery and selection, team formation and domain consensus, bootstrapping and the development of minimum viable product and market experimentation feedback) that are critical to tech start-up emergence. Most prior studies are isolated, as they focus their investigation on specific event. Thus, from this review, the authors developed a framework harmonizing various dimensions of events characterizing emergence of a viable tech start-up.

The researchers conducted this study in response to lingering call for harmonized study that provides in-depth description of how different dimensions of events interact and characterize tech start-up emergence. Consequently, the study resulted in a descriptive framework. Furthermore, the findings highlight some practical implications and proposes new study directions as future research agenda for scholars interested in tech start-up emergence.

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.

A high technology company formation training intervention undertaken at an Innovation Centre in the Mid‐West of Ireland is described and analysed. The programme aimed to stimulate the formation and growth of high technology venture through a range of learning strategies. The programme focused on: o the development of cohesive founding teams; o initiated encouragement of self‐learning, personal development and change, and o the production of a solid business plan, the identification of a market niche and development of managerial skills. The programme utilised a range of integrated learning strategies and focused considerable attention on team formation and development activities. The results of the programme have been significant with considerable success in creating venture teams, new companies and job creation. Statistical evidence on the success of the programme is presented.

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.

This chapter combines insights from organizational theory and the entrepreneurship literature to inform a process-based conception of organizational founding. In contrast to previous discrete-event approaches, the conception argues that founding be viewed as a series of potential entrepreneurial activities – including initiation, resource mobilization, legal establishment, social organization, and operational startup. Drawing on an original data set of 591 entrepreneurs, the study examines the effect of structural, strategic, and environmental contingencies on the relative rates with which different founding activities are pursued. Results demonstrate that social context has a fairly pervasive impact on the occurrence and sequencing of founding processes, with one possible exception being the timing of legal establishment.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate knowledge inheritance theory with the social capital perspective to explain the initial endowments of spinoffs.

The authors maintain that social capital plays a crucial part, both as a mechanism supporting the generation of intellectual capital prior to a spinoff’s foundation, and as an endowment that complements this capital once the spinoff is founded. Knowledge inheritance remains a fundamental mechanism for the formation of a spinoff’s intellectual capital. Its other endowment, social capital, derives from three types of relationship that future entrepreneurs develop within, through and outside their parent firm, all three of which are crucial to the formation of a spinoff’s intellectual capital.

The first result of the theoretical research is an integrative framework of a spinoff’s endowments. Moreover, the authors apply this framework to address two key research questions in the spinoff literature, i.e. whether spinoffs can differ from their parents in terms of intellectual capital; and why spinoffs tend to co-locate near their parents, in geographical clusters. The integrative approach helps to tackle these questions.

This conceptual paper offers a more comprehensive explanation of the emergence of spinoffs in terms of their initial endowments than the knowledge inheritance theory.

This study aims to investigate the internationalisation strategies of small games development firms from Poland and Hungary.

This enquiry adopts a qualitative approach, whereby firms were identified from online searches, and secondary information was sought on each firm prior to in‐depth interview, in order to highlight the issues relating to internationalisation/growth.

The paper provides evidence that small games development firms undertake rapid internationalisation, despite resource constraints. Firms were founded by teams of entrepreneurs who unlike many other international entrepreneurs, did not have a priori experience, sometimes moving from being hobbyists into commercial operations. These often exist in a pre‐natal phase some years before formal incorporation, an important phase when many of the resources required are sourced. The findings show only partial support for RBV, as these firms were acquiring and controlling resources from their environment on a freelance and low commitment basis. The authors speculate that these firms display dynamic capabilities of the highest order in order to do so.

This enquiry adds to understanding of the (international) growth strategies of small games development firms, and gives insight into how they access dynamic capabilities. However, the number of firms investigated is small and from two Eastern European countries, therefore further larger scale research should be undertaken.

Based on this exploration new insights are developed with regard to an under researched sector, and how such firms undertake rapid internationational growth, despite being particularly resource constrained. In particular, the entrpreneurs in these firms have little experience and creatively acquire and control resources in order to grow rapidly. The authors speculate that they display advanced dynamic capabilities.

Entrepreneurs approach the startup process with a stock of experience and a unique range of accumulated skills and abilities. Their prior experience shapes an “information funnel” through which the entrepreneurs’ attention is filtered. This study aims to investigate the impact of the relatedness of prior knowledge and knowledge acquisition activities on entrepreneurs’ perceived knowledge access.

Survey data were collected from 100 early-stage entrepreneurs in the New York City metropolitan area to empirically test the proposed relationships with the method of conditional process modeling.

Findings from this study demonstrate a negative relationship between entrepreneurs’ prior experience and their perceived ability to access knowledge. However, this negative relationship can be mitigated by seeking tacit knowledge through informal channels. In addition, the relatedness of prior experience plays a positive role in influencing media use and knowledge network engagement. While media use is a positive predictor of perceived knowledge access, engagement within knowledge networks shows no direct influence on perceived knowledge access.

This study sheds light on the dimensions of entrepreneurial knowledge and recognizes perceived knowledge access as an important concept in forming an entrepreneurial intention and adds to the current dialogue on the interpretation of entrepreneurs’ prior experience. For practitioners, this study offers insights into the formation of founding teams and the approaches to obtaining valuable information.

Existing studies on crowdsourcing have focused on analyzing isolated contributions by individual participants and thus collaboration dynamics among them are under-investigated. The value of implementing crowdsourcing in problem solving lies in the aggregation of wisdom from a crowd. This study examines how marginality affects collaboration in crowdsourcing.

With population level data collected from a global crowdsourcing community (openideo.com), this study applied social network analysis and in particular bipartite exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) to examine how individual level marginality variables (measured as the degree of being located at the margin) affect the team formation in collaboration crowdsourcing.

Significant effects of marginality are attributed to collaboration skills, number of projects won, community tenure and geolocation. Marginality effects remain significant after controlling for individual level and team level attributes. However, marginality alone cannot explain collaboration dynamics. Participants with leadership experience or more winning ideas are also more likely to be selected as team members.

The core contribution this research makes is the conceptualization and definition of marginality as a mechanism in influencing collaborative crowdsourcing. This study conceptualizes marginality as a multidimensional concept and empirically examines its effect on team collaboration, connecting the literature on crowdsourcing to online collaboration.