When Stars Shine: The Effects of Faculty Founders on New Technology Ventures

Abstract

Despite the increasing importance of faculty entrepreneurship to technology diffusion, wealth creation, and economic growth, we know little about the effects that academic faculty turned entrepreneurs have on the performance of new technology ventures. We argue faculty inventors select their most promising projects for commercialization. We further posit that star faculty founders have positive effects on new venture performance, above and beyond that of the average faculty founder. In addition, we develop two contingency hypotheses to unearth specific situations when ‘stars shine.’ We posit that star faculty founders are able to overcome geographic distance to venture capitalists as well as the disadvantages of not being affiliated with a top research university. We test our hypotheses on a broad sample of 238 university‐related new technology ventures at 65 U.S. universities. Copyright © 2012 Strategic Management Society.

Serial Entrepreneurs and Venture Survival: Evidence from U.S. Venture-Capital-Financed Semiconductor Firms

“…Hence, both the presence and the nature of the entrepreneurial experience are important for entrepreneurial learning (Politis, 2005;Ucbasaran et al, 2010). Therefore, understanding the effect of entrepreneurs' prior VC financing experience on subsequent venture performance is as important as understanding the effect of their prior firm-founding experience Westhead et al, 2003), managerial experience (Stuart and Abetti, 1990), foreign work experience (Li et al, 2012) and incumbent firm work experience (Chatterji, 2009;Fuller and Rothaermel, 2012).…”

How can universities facilitate academic spin-offs? An entrepreneurial competency perspective

“…For instance, star scientists are able to overcome both geographic distance to venture capitalists as well as the disadvantages of not being affiliated with a top research university when founding a new technology venture (Fuller and Rothaermel 2012).…”

The Role of the Entrepreneur in Technology Entrepreneurship

“…They find that talent is particularly critical when technologies are less familiar and industries are in disruption. Fuller and Rothaermel (, this issue) explore the influence of ‘star’ faculty turned entrepreneurs on the likelihood of an initial public offering. Star faculty, they empirically show, are especially valuable for venture success when the firms are started in VC‐poor regions of the United States and when the faculty entrepreneurs are at less elite universities.…”

“…For example, Eesley and Roberts (, this issue) rely on a large‐scale, alumni survey of about 2,000 entrepreneurs from MIT, and they supplement this survey with extensive secondary data. Fuller and Rothaermel (, this issue) construct a unique and broad‐based sample of technology ventures based on patents filed by university faculty. As such, they go beyond the usual approach of focusing on a few elite universities and a single technology such as biotechnology.…”