Exploring Team-formations And The Evolution Of Network-formations Of High-Tech Academic Spin-offs

Abstract

As our modern society keeps changing, the role of universities as a source of creating opportunities for academic entrepreneurs to transform their scientific knowledge into a viable business is becoming significantly important. Even though academic institutions and universities have played a big role in the transfer of knowledge into commercialized solutions ever since they were established (Shane, 2004), in the past, more often than not, such inventions have taken place in non-commercial environments. But the commercialization of specific scientific or technical knowledge through novel high-tech academic spin-offs entails unprecedented entrepreneurial challenges (Vohora et. al., 2004). Thus this paper contributes towards the scholars’ and academic entrepreneurs’ understanding of how teams within high-tech academic spin-offs are able to identify, acquire and assimilate novel and needed external knowledge and resources, and how they transform and exploit those resources to fuel the company’s growth. In other words, due to the uniqueness and novelty of the High-tech academic spin-offs they are relatively underexplored (Lazer and Katz, 2004, Khodaei, 2015) and indicating that studying team effects on networks and growth is a very new area. So this paper makes an attempt to explore the how teams and networks in high-tech academic spin-offs evolve the company grows and how each of these parameters affect each other. As has been observed through our multiple case studies accessing necessary and critical resources is a big challenge faced by these specific firms during their initial development/growth stages (Sullivan and Ford, 2004).

By employing Resource-Based theory, Human Capital and Social Capital theory, we investigate how entrepreneurial teams use networks in order to meet varying resource needs in order to grow. Results illustrate how evolution of team formation transform their corresponding network formation that could lead to the accessibility of new, necessary and relevant resources in ways that could impact the growth of these high-tech academic spin-offs. Consequentially, our findings show how founding members and other team members use their network connections to serve as one of their principal means of identifying, acquiring and assimilating these resources in order to grow. However, we have found that different growth stages of the spin-offs indicated different resource dependencies, so we observed how teams and networks change so as to meet the changing resource requirements. This led us to the interesting conclusion that this is a circular process in a loop. Along with that we have also found how companies operating in different geographic locations or dealing with significantly different product lines have tightly packed heterogeneous network channels with homogeneous network partners within each channel leading us to the fact that they are market leaders in niche markets, whereas, for companies operating in the same geographic locations and/or dealing with similar product lines have interconnected links with/between multiple network partners from different network channels, leading us to the fact that these companies operate in highly competitive markets with complimentary services to each other and due to the abundance in availability of partners.