Drawing on social identity theory, we explore the identities, behaviors, and actions of 49 firm founders in the sports-related equipment industry. Our analysis suggests the existence of three pure types of founder identities and shows how these identities systematically shape key decisions in the creation of new firms, thereby "imprinting" the start-ups with the founders' distinct self-concepts. We synthesize our findings in a typology that sheds light on the heterogeneous meanings that founders associate with new firm creation and that improves understanding as to why fundamental differences in firm creation processes and outcomes exist. An identity is like a compass helping us steer a course of interaction in a sea of social meaning.-Burke and Reitzes (1981: 91

(2017) The open innovation research landscape: established perspectives and emerging themes across different levels of analysis, Industry and Innovation, 24:1, 8-40, DOI: 10.1080/13662716.2016.1240068 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10. 1080/13662716.2016.1240068 Published online: 07 Nov 2016.Submit your article to this journal This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation (OI). The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several OI scholarshaving a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop on 'Researching Open Innovation' at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. In this paper, we present opportunities for future research on OI, organised at different levels of analysis. We discuss some of the contingencies at these different levels, and argue that future research needs to study OI -originally an organisationallevel phenomenon -across multiple levels of analysis. integrative framework allows comparing, contrasting and integrating various perspectives at different levels of analysis, further theorising will be needed to advance OI research. On this basis, we propose some new research categories as well as questions for future research -particularly those that span across research domains that have so far developed in isolation.

Entrepreneurs play a fundamental role in bringing new technologies to market. Because technologies are often configurable to serve a variety of different markets, it is possible for entrepreneurs to identify multiple market opportunities prior to the first market entry of their emerging firms, and if they elect to do so, to therefore have a choice of which market to enter first. The empirical results presented in this paper offer three new insights regarding this important early-stage choice in new firm creation. First, they reveal that serial entrepreneurs have learned through prior start-up experience to generate a "choice set" of alternative market opportunities before deciding which one to pursue in their new firm creation. Second, the analysis indicates that entrepreneurs who identify a "choice set" of market opportunities prior to first entry derive performance benefits by doing so. Third, the positive relationship between the number of market opportunities identified prior to first entry and new firm performance is nonlinear and subject to decreasing marginal return. The research literature has yet to acknowledge the notion of multiple opportunity identification prior to entry, and the related idea of selecting the most favorable market opportunity for the creation of a new technology firm.market opportunities, serial entrepreneurs, technological commercialization, new firm creation

The choice of the firm's market environment is one of the fundamental decisions of firm founders. We study the pre-entry generation of founders' market choice sets by investigating their search for market opportunities in which the firm's technological resources, as embodied in a product or service, can be commercialized. Analyzing data collected through personal interviews with founders of 496 technology ventures, we find that founding teams with more diverse industry experience and more diverse external knowledge sourcing relationships identify not only a larger number of but, in particular, more varied (distant) market opportunities. However, the extent to which strategic variety of such opportunities is identified depends on the founders' technological expertise, whereas technological expertise is less relevant in identification of the number of opportunities. Furthermore, by showing that the extent and nature of the firm's pre-entry opportunity set has a significant effect on the likelihood of subsequent firm diversification, we document how initial constraints in founders' choice sets can have a lasting impact on the growth potential that the new firm exploits over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on organizational learning and innovation, entrepreneurship, as well as the strategy literature examining firm growth, diversification, and value creation.

N ew firms are endowed with knowledge and experience at birth through the human capital of their founder(s). Existing empirical research suggests that this pre-entry knowledge and experience will influence the firm's chances of survival; however, the mechanisms underlying this relationship have yet to be investigated. We seek to better understand and unpack this relationship. Specifically, we study the extent to which a founder's pre-entry knowledge of the business activity and pre-entry management experience influence the effectiveness of two subsequent learning activities-namely, early-stage business planning and product-line change. Our findings suggest that pre-entry knowledge and management experience increase firm survival through moderating the effects of these subsequent learning activities. We also find that learning activities are not always beneficial; in our sample, early-stage business planning is associated with decreased firm survival, and product line change is associated with increased firm survival. We examine these patterns using survey data collected from 436 individuals in the Munich region who founded their own firms as an alternative to continued unemployment. Our results have theoretical implications for the entrepreneurship, evolutionary economics, and organizational learning literatures.

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The start-up team plays a key role in venture capitalists' evaluations of venture proposals. Our findings go beyond existing research, first by providing a detailed exploration of VCs' team evaluation criteria, and second by investigating the moderator variable of VC experience. Our results reveal utility trade-offs between team characteristics and thus provide answers to questions such as "What strength does it take to compensate for a weakness in characteristic A?" Moreover, our analysis reveals that novice VCs tend to focus on the qualifications of individual team members, while experienced VCs focus more on team cohesion. Data were obtained in a conjoint experiment with 51 professionals in VC firms and analyzed using discrete choice econometric models.

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