Early-Stage Businesses, Resource Inheritance, and Coworkers Hiring: The Moderating Role of Founder’s Human Capital

The role of firm’s resources or specifically knowledge in achieving sustained competitive advantage has been well established in strategic management literature. To strengthen their competitive advantage, extent or enrich their knowledge base, firms used to hire people embedding appropriate human capital. Whereas the nature of this competitive advantage has been largely investigated, it is not exactly the case for the processes or conditions through which firms used to construct it. This paper wants to contribute to a better understanding of how it is constructed by investigating, how far the resource that spinoff already has constrained, or determine the acquisition of next ones. We are considering spinoffs and spinouts as two distinct configurations of knowledge inheritance with the former being different from the latter in that s(he) benefits from additional support of financial or physical nature from its previous employer. Nevertheless, nothing is clear on the respective role of knowledge the spinoffs/spinouts have inherited from mother firm or industry and that of the founders leading the business creation process—namely her/his human capital. We hypothesize a greater preference for coworkers hiring in case of greater inheritance of resources from a mother company. The propensity of spinoffs/spinouts to hire founders’ previous coworkers should be greater than that of other entrants but moderating effect should be expected giving a relative importance to person who is hiring. First results come with new evidences supporting old arguments of some resource-based views of scholars regarding the importance of resources that characterizes a firm and its position in terms of competitive advantage. These evidences are compelling for they suggest that the phenomenon already begin at firm’s early stage and extends it on preoccupations of first hires. Other results are also interesting in understanding the contribution of the status of some new businesses in worker mobility, knowledge diffusion, competition between spinoffs/spinouts and mother firms, and in a certain sense cluster dynamics.