The Parent's Legacy: Firm Founders and Technological Choice

Central to research in innovation and entrepreneurship is the argument that new ventures are influenced by the prior experiences of their founders. This study investigates how differences in founders' work experiences and prior career positions affect a new venture's technological choices at the time of founding. We argue that individual founders use their influence to guide the venture toward adopting their parent firms' technologies, and that founders with more valuable expertise will have a greater influence on the venture's technological choices. Our results illustrate that the structural and social influence of individual founders affect the degree to which founding teams of new ventures mimic the technologies of their parents.