Management of Technology

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the relation between levels of domain specific knowledge of company executives and their companies' performance. In researching this relation we have chosen to research internet companies during their emerging stages in a high growth industry. We have opted to select a data sample of 411 internet companies which had their initial public offering between 1997 and 2003. For the levels of domain specific knowledge we used two main metrics for the research: formal: ‘Engineering degrees’, and tacit knowledge ‘Years' experience in the management of technology’. Company performance we had separated into: ‘survival’ and ‘share price performance’. We also investigated for interactions with the independent variable: 'average age of the executive team', 'company size' and the 'degree of digitalization'. Our research concludes the following: 1) Domain specific knowledge of the executive management team of a company increases the chances of survival of a company significantly. 2)There has been no significant correlation between domain specific knowledge and the share price performance of a company (nor the surrogate: revenue performance) 3)There is no significant interaction for age, company size or degree of digitalization.