סמינר משותף-התנהגות ארגונית ואסטרטגיה ניהולית

ד״ר טלי הדס-בלנק,האוניברסיטה העברית

Founder Motivation and Startup Survival: Giving, Taking, and Market Understanding

 Being an entrepreneur is not easy, and may not even be financially worthwhile. Why do people choose to start a new venture anyway, and do different motivations affect venture success? The entrepreneurial motivations to give or to take refer, respectively, to a founding team’s desire to start a new venture in order to benefit others or to benefit themselves.  Drawing on motivated information processing theory, we explain the mechanism that bridges entrepreneurs’ types of motivation and startup survival. We develop hypotheses about these entrepreneurial motivations and test them on a dataset that includes 178 founders from 75 startup teams operating at the Harvard Innovation Lab. Our findings suggest that startups whose founders were primarily motivated by taking exhibit a higher survival rate compared to startups whose founders were primarily motivated by giving. However, startups whose founders had a mix of giving and taking motivations had an advantage over startups with more homogeneous motivations. Furthermore, motivation interacted with the team’s market understanding to affect startup survival; high motivation to give coupled with low market understanding was associated with a lower survival rate. These findings emphasize the crucial, and sometimes surprising, influence of founding team motivation on startup survival.