Lab, Gig or Enterprise? How scientist-inventors form nascent startup teams,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2020.106074Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Academic entrepreneurs play an active role in entrepreneurial team formation.

  • Scientists form startup teams based on how they want to commercialize technologies.

  • Scientists bring to team formation more knowledge & connections than is thought.

  • Design models and principles capture key variations in how scientists form teams.

Abstract

The entrepreneurial teams that form around university-based technologies influence whether and how those technologies are commercialized. Past research has emphasized the roles of external actors, such as technology transfer officers or investors, in managing the evolution of academic startup teams. But less is known about how individual scientist-inventors form their initial teams. To explore that process, we conducted longitudinal interviews with nine scientist-inventors leading nascent startups at major U.S. universities. Our analyses revealed that these scientists were working with a more extensive set of commercially-relevant knowledge and network connections than past research has accounted for. In fact, the scientists had their own “lay theories” of academic entrepreneurship that encompassed team-specific ideas as well as broader ideas about how their technologies ought to be commercialized. We identified four “design principles” capturing key variations in what the scientists hoped to achieve through their teams: control, scope, entitativity, and dynamism. We further found these principles clustered into three distinct commercialization models, which we called Lab, Gig, and Enterprise. Finally, we elaborated the models' implications for the scientists' team formation strategies, the sources through which they identified new members, and their approaches to dealing with administrators and investors. Our findings change what we know about nascent academic startups by showing how scientists play a critical internal role alongside, prior to, and sometimes instead of the external drivers of team formation whose roles have been more extensively documented.

Keywords

Academic entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurial teams
Founders
Cognition
Knowledge
New ventures
Team design

Cited by (0)

This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Program on Innovation & Organizational Change, Grant # SES-0322-512 and by the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation.

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We are grateful to Lisa Auster-Gussman, Mary Benner, Henrik Bresman, Stuart Bunderson, Gerard Hodgkinson, Phillip Kim, Kaye Schoonhoven, Jaume Villanueva, and Ruth Wageman, among others, and to seminar participants at USC, Oxford, and the U. of Maastricht for their help in developing these ideas. We further acknowledge valuable feedback from participants at: the U. of Wisconsin's Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship (INSITE) Conference; Carnegie Mellon U.'s Carnegie Bosch Identity, Innovation, and Organizational Learning Conference; the Tilburg Conference on Innovation; and the Organization Science Winter Conference.