Honeymoons and the Liability of Adolescence: A New Perspective on Duration Dependence in Social and Organizational Relationships

Fichman, Mark; Levinthal, Daniel A.

doi:10.5465/amr.1991.4278962

Cited by 425 publications

(189 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Second, business age influences long-term business survival. The results reflect a liability of adolescence pattern (Bruderl and Schussler, 1990;Fichman and Levinthal, 1991). As compared to AGE9 businesses (businesses 82 years or older in the baseline year), long-term survival is shorter for businesses that were 21 years or younger in the baseline year (AGE1-AGE5), with AGE2 businesses showing the greatest survival vulnerabilities, indicating that the survival threat is greatest for young businesses that have run through their initial capital.…”

Section: Hypothesis Testsmentioning

confidence: 83%

When is more better? The impact of business scale and scope on long‐term business survival, while controlling for profitability

Bercovitz

Mitchell

2006

Strategic Management Journal

120

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Section: Hypothesis Testsmentioning

confidence: 83%

When is more better? The impact of business scale and scope on long‐term business survival, while controlling for profitability

Bercovitz

Mitchell

2006

Strategic Management Journal

120

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“…The main risks stem from the absence of a past track record and of a resource buffer at a venture level (Davidsson and Klofsten 2003;De Coster and Butler 2005;Lerner 2005), which are closely connected to the liabilities of newness/adolescence and smallness (Stinchcombe 1965;Brüderl and Schussler 1990;Fichman and Levinthal 1991). The absence of a prior track record for a venture often hampers their ability to obtain sufficient resources Harrison et al 2004), as this absence forces external entities to base their assessment mainly on the characteristics of the key persons (Ostgaard and Birley 1996) in terms of human as well as social capital.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How human capital interacts with the early development of academic spin-offs

2014

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This paper focuses on venture team characteristics with respect to human capital dimensions in early stage ventures emerging from academic research (institutions). Three major groups have been investigated: founders, top managers and directors. Data was obtained using personal interviews with 185 product-oriented academic spin-offs in nine European countries, including those of 17 failures. The results show a significant positive-but diminishing-impact of team heterogeneity on venture success, as well as a positive impact from legal expertise within the board of directors. At management level, the results further indicate that larger management team are better equipped to face the challenges in academic spin-offs. Furthermore, the added value of serial entrepreneurs is questioned, since they seem to negatively impact a spin-off's survival chances. Several implications are addressed, dealing with an appropriate team composition (on the levels of both top management and the board of directors) as well as the importance of paying attention to team development.

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“…In effect, that model implies a liability of newness (Carroll and Delacroix 1982, Carroll 1983, Freeman et al 1983), a liability of adolescence (Carroll and Huo 1988, Brüderl and Schüssler 1990, Fichman and Levinthal 1991, or a liability of aging, depending on the conditions prevailing at time of founding. As discussed in §1, however, that model could not deal with obsolescence because it assumed that organizational performance systematically increased over time.…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational Obsolescence, Drifting Tastes, and Age Dependence in Organizational Life Chances

Mens

Hannan

Pólos

2015

Organization Science

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V arious patterns of age dependence in hazards of organizational failure have been documented: liabilities of newness, adolescence, and obsolescence. Prior efforts at providing a unified theory that can accommodate these patterns as special cases have not dealt properly with obsolescence. We tackle this problem by proposing a new model that builds on the most recent unification attempt while integrating the core intuition behind obsolescence: organizations have trouble adapting to drifting environments, which leads to declining performance and, in turn, to decreasing viability. In doing so, we develop a comprehensive representational framework to precisely characterize obsolescence. Our perspective builds on recent theory and research that treats categories as constructions by audiences. We characterize environmental drift as changing audience tastes in a multidimensional feature space and organizational inertia as a decreasing ability for producers to move quickly in that space. This combination creates obsolescence with aging. We then integrate this perspective with prior theory to make novel predictions regarding the age dependence in life chances over the life courses of organizations. We also show how the predictions of our theory can be tested empirically by adapting Levinthal's random walk model [Levinthal DA (1991) Random walks and organizational mortality. Admin. Sci. Quart. 36(3):397-420] to incorporate the possibility of organizational obsolescence.

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Honeymoons and the Liability of Adolescence: A New Perspective on Duration Dependence in Social and Organizational Relationships

Cited by 425 publications

References 35 publications

When is more better? The impact of business scale and scope on long‐term business survival, while controlling for profitability

When is more better? The impact of business scale and scope on long‐term business survival, while controlling for profitability

How human capital interacts with the early development of academic spin-offs

Organizational Obsolescence, Drifting Tastes, and Age Dependence in Organizational Life Chances

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