Performance Heterogeneity Among Service-Sector Entrepreneurial Spinoffs

In recent years, beliefs about entrepreneurial spinoffs have coalesced around several ``stylized facts,'' including the perspective that knowledge is transferred from parent-firms to progeny in hereditary fashion, such that spinoffs emanating from high-quality parent-firms outperform the spinoffs from low-quality parent-firms. This emerging orthodoxy has found some support in fast- changing and technologically complex sectors, but it is less clear whether parental endowments are a key determinant of operational success in the context of service-oriented sectors, which comprise more 80\% of many developed economies. Through the discovery and analysis of a complete industry population, the results of this study suggest that extant perspectives may not fully account for the extreme heterogeneity of performance that is often exhibited by entrepreneurial spinoffs, especially differences among firms spawned by the same parent. These findings contribute to the ongoing discussion of intra-industry entrepreneurial spinoffs by establishing much-needed boundary conditions and by revealing underlying logics that govern the hereditary transfer of knowledge and capabilities among service sector spinoffs.