Alliances and the innovation performance of corporate and public research spin-off firms

We explore the innovation performance benefits of alliances for spin-off firms, in particular spin-offs either from other firms or from public research organizations. During the early years of the emerging combinatorial chemistry industry, the industry on which our empirical analysis focuses, spin-offs engaged in alliances with large and established partners, partners of similar type and size, and with public research organizations, often for different reasons. We seek to understand to what extent alliances of spin-offs with other firms (either large- or small- and medium-sized firms) affected their innovation performance and also how this performance may have been affected by their corporate or public research background. We find evidence that in general alliances of spin-offs with other firms, in particular alliances with large firms, increased their innovation performance. Corporate spin-offs that formed alliances with other firms outperformed public research spin-offs with such alliances. This suggests that, in terms of their innovation performance, corporate spin-offs that engaged in alliances with other firms seemed to have benefitted from their prior corporate background. Interestingly, it turns out that the negative impact of alliances on the innovation performance of public research spin-offs was largely affected by their alliances with small- and medium-sized firms

Co-leadership and performance in technology-based entrepreneurial firms

The notion of co-leadership, de!ned as a structural arrangement where the formal responsibilities at the top of the company are attributed to multiple persons, is receiving increasing attention in recent years as one of the possible conceptualizations of the leadership \u201cin plural form\u201d. Our research aims at exploring the performance implications of co-leadership arrangements in the top management teams (TMTs) of technology based entrepreneurial !rms, and at evaluating how such impact is likely to occur. The study is carried out on a sample of technology based entrepreneurial !rms operating in Italy. Our study contributes mainly to the literature on co-leadership, by identifying different structural con!gurations of plural leadership and by shedding some light on the paths through which co-leadership arrangements have an impact on company performance

Family Firm Types Based on the Level of Professionalism of the Top Management Team

This chapter responds to the calls for identifying different categories of family firms. The authors contribute to the literature by extending family firm typologies. To reach this goal, they introduce the construct of the professionalism of the Top Management Team (TMT). In order to expose the multidimensional nature of the TMT, they first review the literature on TMTs based on Hambrick’s and Mason’s (1984) demographic variables. Thus, they conduct a cluster analysis on an original dataset of 500 Italian family firms to identify the different “types” of family firms based on a multidimensional conceptualization of TMT professionalization

Entrepreneurial Leadership Across Countries: The Role of Informal Institutions

This chapter examines the influence of informal institutions on the probability of becoming an entrepreneurial leader. In this regard, institutional economics is used to frame the hypotheses that relate to environmental factors and entrepreneurial leadership. These hypotheses are tested through logistic regression analysis, using a sample of 67,268 individuals from the World Values Survey (WVS) for 50 countries. The main findings show that informal institutions such as independence, risk-taking, and networking increase the probability of becoming an entrepreneurial leader. Also, networking and religious faith moderate the relationship between independence and entrepreneurial leadership. The contributions of this chapter are both conceptual, regarding development in the field of leadership and entrepreneurship and practices concerning business and education