The Spawning of Ecosystems: How Cohort Effects Benefit New Ventures
研究提出同群效应理论框架，发现从同一成熟企业迁移到新创企业的发明者之间共享经验，能促进新创企业间的联盟、招聘和知识质量提升，对创业者和投资者有参考价值。
Research has examined the process of “entrepreneurial migration,” whereby employees from successful industry incumbents move to new ventures. This phenomenon has been linked to direct benefits to entrepreneurial firms, offering valuable knowledge and routines obtained by employees during their tenure at incumbent firms. We propose a theoretical framework in which shared experience—a common background in beneficial knowledge management practices—creates a “cohort effect,” facilitating direct ties and innovation benefits to new ventures receiving inventors from the same incumbent firms. Analyzing longitudinal data on inventor migration to 658 new biotech ventures tracked from 1990 to 2013, we find shared migration ties increase knowledge and market overlap between firms, enhancing their likelihood of direct engagement through alliances and employee hiring as well as the quality of knowledge they develop. Our core theoretical contribution is the identification of a migration cohort effect, in which inventors who share contemporaneous experiences at incumbent firms and migrate to new ventures create unique relationships between those ventures. Where prior research on spawning and migration has focused primarily on the direct benefit of human capital transfer from incumbents to new ventures, we explore the broader network implications of similarities and interactions between firms receiving this human capital.