مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد سرمايه انساني غير بنیانگذار و رشد و بقای درازمدت پروژه با تکنولوژی بالا

مقاله سال 2017

There is a sizeable body of literature on human capital in high-tech firms (Westhead and Cowling, 1995; Aspelund et al., 2005; Colombo and Grilli 2005, 2010; Ganotakis 2012; Delgado-Verde et al., 2016) but, in line with the widely prevalent ‘upper echelon’ theory (Hambrick and Mason, 1984), nearly all of this literature has focused on the role of founders, CEOs or top management teams. This paper draws from a diffuse but growing body of research on the role of non-founder human capital (Smith et al., 2005; Klaas et al., 2010; De Winne and Sels, 2010 ; Andries and Czarnitzki, 2014). While founders are clearly important, this paper aims to provide a counterpoint to ‘upper echelon’ approaches by arguing that the ability to access these workforce skills plays a crucial role in shaping the growth and survival prospects of a firm as it progresses through its life course.

This study’s examination of the relationship between non-founder human capital and performance is also informed by recent criticism of the use of single measures such as survival, employment growth, or sales growth (Miller et al., 2013; Coad et al., 2016a). Indeed, research on ‘growth’ and ‘survival’ shows that these terms should not be considered in isolation. For instance, many companies may survive for years without generating meaningful economic growth (Nightingale and Coad, 2014; Brown and Mason, 2014). Meanwhile the growing body of literature discussing entrepreneurial exit explores the multitude of reasons why firms may shut down for reasons that are not immediately associated with ‘failure’, such as retirement or the availability of attractive opportunities for the entrepreneur elsewhere (Wennberg et al., 2010, 2016; Coad, 2014; DeTienne et al., 2015; Luzzi and Sasson, 2016). This has been conceptualised in Gimeno et al. (1997) and DeTienne et al. (2008), who consider entrepreneurs’ thresholds for exit and argue that a range of personal and environmental factors may increase or lower an entrepreneur’s willingness to persist with their business despite poor performance. This paper builds on this work to consider the role of access to different sources of human capital on firms’ tendency to persist despite low growth, exit despite high growth, or thrive by continuing through high growth.

A firm’s likelihood to persist, exit or grow is significantly informed by the stage of the life course in which the firm is observed. The firm aging literature (Henderson, 1999; Sorensen and Stuart 2000; Thornhill and Amit 2003) demonstrates the range of challenges that firms face as they progress from new firms, into ‘adolescence’ (see Aspelund et al. (2005), Courderoy et al. (2012) on new technology based firms, or NTBFs), and on into maturity. As firms age they face different requirements for human capital, investment (financial capital) and market challenges. These changing demands of the life course have significant implications on entrepreneurs’ threshold for exit, as does entrepreneurs’ ability to access resources such as workforce skills. This paper sets forth a model linking skills, threshold theory and firm aging,in which it argues that inability to access certain types of human capital at a particular time in a firm’s life course may have significant longterm consequences on its performance and/or survival. In particular, it argues that while founders themselves may have sufficient human capital to keep firms from failing, lack of non-founder managerial capital in initial phases of the life course lowers these founders’ threshold for acceptable returns required not to exit. Consequently founders accept suboptimal returns instead of exiting the market. Conversely, the paper argues that among firms that have shown higher growth, lack of specific managerial capital later in the life course means that founders may choose to exit rather than continue their successful businesses.