Lost in translation: Linking technology to market opportunities in technology-based ventures

Opportunity evaluation;Expertise;Experiential search;Institutional logics;Top management teams;Academic entrepreneurship;Entrepreneurial experience;Innovation

Savage, Jeffrey P.

关键词: Opportunity evaluation;    Expertise;    Experiential search;    Institutional logics;    Top management teams;    Academic entrepreneurship;    Entrepreneurial experience;    Innovation;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/99164/SAVAGE-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation seeks to better understand and predict the behaviors of technology-based entrepreneurial ventures operating under conditions of high uncertainty. To do this, I take a deep dive into the innovative process of de novo ventures built around university inventions through a series of three related essays. The first essay links insights from the innovation literature with the entrepreneurial opportunity literature to examine the effects of founders’ prior experience and level of expertise on the technology-driven search process. I find that founder effects are quite different for experiential search for market opportunities, when compared to opportunity identification. The second essay builds on these findings through use of a mixed-methods approach to examine how the strength of founders’ experience, level of expertise and logics (their attention-focusing worldviews) affect the time in which it takes the technology-based venture to (successfully) commercialize. The third essay employs an experimental approach to unpack the relationship between individual functional expertise and uncertainty in the opportunity evaluation process. The findings suggest that individual’s experience can limit the attention and focus they give to loci of uncertainty falling outside of their functional expertise. Overall, the dissertation highlights the role of founder’s experience, expertise and logics in shaping the direction of the venture’s early start-up stages, the unexpected role of founders with little expertise in these processes, and the link between uncertainty and functional experience in entrepreneurial efforts.