Institutional Origin and Resource Endowments to Science-Based Entrepreneurial Firms : A European Exploration

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which institutional origin has an impact on the resource endowments of science-based entrepreneurial firms, which are founded from the research base developed at public research organisations. Investigation of the potential explanatory capacity of the nature of institutional origin on the resource endowments of science-based entrepreneurial firms at time of founding is potentially important for different reasons. First, public research organisations are increasingly recognised as playing a key role in knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination and economic growth (OECD, 1998; 2003) and the US was the first country to set the stage. Secondly, both the early neo-institutional framework and resource based view have been criticised: the institutional framework for its focus on homogeneity and persistence of organisational forms (Dacin et al, 2002); the resource based view for not taking into account the context of resource acquisition (Oliver, 1997). Thus, combining elements from both an institutional and resource-based perspective in a conceptual model of firm heterogeneity and similarity may shed some/new light on how institutional origin of science-based entrepreneurial firms explains the resource conditions of these companies. Finally, this study is also important because it typically focuses on the founding conditions of companies. More specifically, the question of initial resource endowments has been argued to be of significant interest in organizational ecology, evolutionary theory and entrepreneurship research (Shane and Stuart, 2002). The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. First, we describe the context in which the phenomenon of science-based entrepreneurial firms has increasingly gained momentum. Second, we develop the conceptual model combining elements from both institutional and resource based perspectives, hypothesising that institutional origin explains firm resources and growth. Third, we discuss the data and methods employed. Fourth, we present the analyses and the results, developing the main findings of this research. We conclude with a discussion section pointing to the main implications