Forthcoming in Organization Science (Special Issue on Genesis and Dynamics of Organizational Networks I thank INSEAD's Rudolf and Valeria Maag International Centre for Entrepreneurship for financial support. I am grateful to Phil Anderson, Henrich Greve and Martin Gargiulo for their unflinching encouragement and support for this project. I also acknowledge the valuable feedback on earlier versionsof this paper that I have received from N.

This paper investigates the effects of organizational form on problemistic search. We contrast how Indian firms affiliated with business groups and unaffiliated firms evaluate performance and react by adjusting their internal technology search and external market search. We propose that, compared with unaffiliated firms, business group–affiliated (BG-affiliated) firms are more externally oriented in setting aspiration levels and more likely to respond to low performance in the market domain. We find support for an external orientation of BG-affiliated firms and find that group affiliation determines the responsiveness to performance feedback in different search domains. The findings suggest a need to add considerations of organizational form and governance to the theory of organizational search.

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This study investigates the impact of entrepreneurial teams' external networks on their ventures' performance. We first argue that ventures whose entrepreneurial teams span many structural holes in their external advice networks experience higher performance. We then propose that network ties are not uniform in their effect, but rather are contingent on two distinct features of entrepreneurial teams: (i) their strategic consensus—extent of agreement on key goals and strategies within the team—and (ii) internal cohesion—extent of interpersonal friendships within the team. Finally, we propose that team demographics and team networks complement (rather than substitute) each other. Data from Indian software ventures provide support for these arguments. We extend entrepreneurship research by highlighting how venture teams' internal processes and external networks jointly shape performance outcomes. We also add to the literature on team networks by drawing attention to the role of strategic consensus as a distinct pathway through which teams can leverage their external networks.