Realizing Potential: The Impact of Business Incubation upon the Absorptive Capacity of New Technology Based Firms

This article explores the potential of university technology business incubators to enhance the absorptive capacity of new technology-based firms. The research pursues three critical themes: it employs the absorptive capacity construct to analyse and evaluate the potential of incubation to strengthen the business model of new technology firms. It then explores the interaction between founders and incubator directors, mentors and business advisers to assess how this might enhance absorptive capacity. Finally, it indicates how such interactions can facilitate the transition from potential to realised absorptive capacity. The article interrogates the incubation process by using the absorptive capacity framework to evaluate how it might strengthen the business model of new technology firms. The qualitative findings suggest that where founders, advisers, mentors and incubator directors engage collaboratively to create an iterative dialogue which informs the development of a viable business model, the process by which potential absorptive capacity can be fully realised is substantially strengthened

Gender Differences in Equity Crowdfunding

Online peer-to-peer investment platforms are increasingly popular venues for entrepreneurs and investors to engage in financial transactions without the involvement of banks and loan managers. Despite their purported transparency and lack of bias, it is unclear whether social inequalities present in traditional capital markets transfer to these platforms as well, impeding their hoped revolutionary potential. In this paper we analyze nearly four years' worth of data from one of the leading UK-based equity crowdfunding platforms. Specifically, we investigate gender-related differences in patterns of entrepreneurship, investment, and success. In agreement with offline trends, men have more activity on the platform. Yet, women entrepreneurs benefit of higher success rates in fund-raising, a finding that mimics trends seen on some rewards-based crowdfunding platforms. Surprisingly, we also find that female investors tend to choose campaigns that have lower success rates. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of gender-related discrepancies in success on the online capital market and point to differences in activity that are key factors in the apparent patterns of gender inequality

Engineering Bureaucracy: The Genesis of Formal Policies, Positions, and Structures in High-Technology Firms

[Excerpt] This article examines the impact of organizational founding conditions on several facets of bureaucratization—managerial intensity, the proliferation of specialized managerial and administrative roles, and formalization of employment relations. Analyzing information on a sample of technology start-ups in California\u27s Silicon Valley, we characterize the organizational models or blueprints espoused by founders in creating new enterprises. We find that those models and the social composition of the labor force at the time of founding had enduring effects on growth in managerial intensity (i.e., reliance on managerial and administrative specialists) over time. Our analyses thus provide compelling evidence of path dependence in the evolution of bureaucracy—even in a context in which firms face intense selection pressures—and underscore the importance of the logics of organizing that founders bring to new enterprises. We find less evidence that founding models exert persistent effects on the formalization of employment relations or on the proliferation of specialized senior management titles. Rather, consistent with neo-institutional perspectives on organizations, those superficial facets of bureaucracy appear to be shaped by the need to satisfy external gatekeepers (venture capitalists and the constituents of public corporations), as well as by exigencies of organizational scale, growth, and aging. We discuss some implications of these results for efforts to understand the varieties, determinants, and consequences of bureaucracy

Determinants of Managerial Intensity in the Early Years of Organizations

This paper examines how founding conditions shape subsequent organizational evolution— specifically, the proliferation of management and administrative jobs. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative information on a sample of young technology start-ups in California’s Silicon Valley, we examine the enduring imprint of two aspects of firms’ founding conditions: the employment blueprints espoused by founders in creating new enterprises; and the social capital that existed among key early members of the firm—their social composition and social relations. We find that the initial gender mix in start-ups and the blueprint espoused by the founder influence the extent of managerial intensity that develops over time. In particular, firms whose founders espoused a bureaucratic model from the outset subsequently grew more administratively intense than otherwise-similar companies, particularly companies whose founders had initially championed a “commitment” model. Also, firms with a higher representation of women within the first year subsequently were slower to bureaucratize than otherwise-similar firms with a predominance of males. Our analyses thus provide compelling evidence of path-dependence in the evolution of organizational structures and underscore the importance of the “logics of organizing” that founders bring to new enterprises. Implications of these results for organizational theory and research are discussed

Dynamics of Innovation in an “Open Source” Collaboration Environment: Lurking, Laboring and Launching FLOSS Projects on SourceForge

A systems analysis perspective is adopted to examine the critical properties of the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) mode of innovation, as reflected on the SourceForge platform (SF.net). This approach re-scales March’s (1991) framework and applies it to characterize the “innovation system” of a “distributed organization” of interacting agents in a virtual collaboration environment. The innovation system of the virtual collaboration environment is an emergent property of two “coupled” processes: one involves interactions among agents searching for information to use in designing novel software products, and the other involves the mobilization of individual capabilities for application in the software development projects. Micro-dynamics of this system are studied empirically by constructing transition probability matrices representing movements of 222,835 SF.net users among 7 different activity states. Estimated probabilities are found to form first-order Markov chains describing ergodic processes. This makes it possible to computate the equilibrium distribution of agents among the states, thereby suppressing transient effects and revealing persisting patterns of project-joining and project-launching.innovation systems, collaborative development environments, industrial districts, exploration and exploitation dynamics, open source software, FLOSS, SourceForge, project-joining, project-founding, Markov chain analysis.

The Transformation of Trust in China’s Alternative Food Networks: Disruption, Reconstruction, and Development

Food safety issues in China have received much scholarly attention, yet few studies systematically examined this matter through the lens of trust. More importantly, little is known about the transformation of different types of trust in the dynamic process of food production, provision, and consumption. We consider trust as an evolving interdependent relationship between different actors. We used the Beijing County Fair, a prominent ecological farmers’ market in China, as an example to examine the transformation of trust in China’s alternative food networks. We argue that although there has been a disruption of institutional trust among the general public since 2008 when the melamine-tainted milk scandal broke out, reconstruction of individual trust and development of organizational trust have been observed, along with the emergence and increasing popularity of alternative food networks. Based on more than six months of fieldwork on the emerging ecological agriculture sector in 13 provinces across China as well as monitoring of online discussions and posts, we analyze how various social factors—including but not limited to direct and indirect reciprocity, information, endogenous institutions, and altruism—have simultaneously contributed to the transformation of trust in China’s alternative food networks. The findings not only complement current social theories of trust, but also highlight an important yet understudied phenomenon whereby informal social mechanisms have been partially substituting for formal institutions and gradually have been building trust against the backdrop of the food safety crisis in China

Hnrnph1 Is A Quantitative Trait Gene for Methamphetamine Sensitivity.

Psychostimulant addiction is a heritable substance use disorder; however its genetic basis is almost entirely unknown. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in mice offers a complementary approach to human genome-wide association studies and can facilitate environment control, statistical power, novel gene discovery, and neurobiological mechanisms. We used interval-specific congenic mouse lines carrying various segments of chromosome 11 from the DBA/2J strain on an isogenic C57BL/6J background to positionally clone a 206 kb QTL (50,185,512-50,391,845 bp) that was causally associated with a reduction in the locomotor stimulant response to methamphetamine (2 mg/kg, i.p.; DBA/2J < C57BL/6J)-a non-contingent, drug-induced behavior that is associated with stimulation of the dopaminergic reward circuitry. This chromosomal region contained only two protein coding genes-heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein, H1 (Hnrnph1) and RUN and FYVE domain-containing 1 (Rufy1). Transcriptome analysis via mRNA sequencing in the striatum implicated a neurobiological mechanism involving a reduction in mesolimbic innervation and striatal neurotransmission. For instance, Nr4a2 (nuclear receptor subfamily 4, group A, member 2), a transcription factor crucial for midbrain dopaminergic neuron development, exhibited a 2.1-fold decrease in expression (DBA/2J < C57BL/6J; p 4.2 x 10-15). Transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs)-mediated introduction of frameshift deletions in the first coding exon of Hnrnph1, but not Rufy1, recapitulated the reduced methamphetamine behavioral response, thus identifying Hnrnph1 as a quantitative trait gene for methamphetamine sensitivity. These results define a novel contribution of Hnrnph1 to neurobehavioral dysfunction associated with dopaminergic neurotransmission. These findings could have implications for understanding the genetic basis of methamphetamine addiction in humans and the development of novel therapeutics for prevention and treatment of substance abuse and possibly other psychiatric disorders