It is widely accepted that new ventures – particularly in the high-technology industry – spur growth of national economies. In these firms, founders are perceived to be eminently influential as their “talent, experience, actions […] are particularly influential when complex technological advancements play a critical role in the venture” (Beckman, Eisenhardt, Kotha, Meyer, & Rajagopalan, 2012: 203). However, research so far has rarely studied the implications of founder involvement in research and development (=R&D) for firms’ innovativeness and success. In the first project phase, we investigated how founder involvement in R&D influences novelty generation on the team level and how it spurs firm survival and growth on the firm level. In doing so, we achieved a deeper understanding of founders’ direct and indirect influence on inventive activities in their companies. We showed that founders facilitate new knowledge assimilation in R&D collaborations with other firms (Müller, Syme, & Häussler, 2020), and that as members of their company’s inventor teams, they lead these teams to generate inventions with technological components that are more novel (Figge, Häussler, & Müller, 2021). The revealed result that founders have an idiosyncratic effect on the R&D activities of their firms leaves us with the question of its origin. Hence, in the second project phase, we aim to shed light on the mechanism of founders’ idiosyncratic influence by disentangling entrepreneurial decision making in the context of R&D. In order to do so, we will investigate how the individual situation of founders – e.g., founders’ ownership share, their managerial responsibility, and their technological and entrepreneurial expertise – influences inventing activities on the patent level. Furthermore, we will explore the interplay of founder-specific and firms’ structural aspects on innovativeness at firm level. This has been motivated by our findings that outside investors impact the size of the top management team (=TMT) and that venture capital investors are able to leverage the positive impact of founder involvement in R&D on firm growth (Häussler, Hennicke, & Müller, 2019). This suggests an interesting interplay of founders, TMTs, investors, and the firms’ innovative activities – which has so far not been thoroughly investigated. Thus, we aim to investigate how ownership distribution, allocation of managerial responsibility, and changes in the TMT, impact the innovativeness of emerging firms.

Since September 2021 the project is conducted at ZEW.