Start-up Inertia versus Flexibility: The Role of Founder Identity in a Nascent Industry
通过研究新兴空中出租车市场的四家初创企业，发现创始人身份（革命者或发现者）通过身份确认机制影响企业表现出惯性或灵活性，对理解初创企业行为有重要启示。
Through an inductive, comparative study of four early entrants in the nascent air taxi market, we examine why start-ups, generally characterized as flexible, malleable entities, might instead exhibit inertial behavior. While two of the firms engaged in ongoing experimentation and adaptation, two firms actively reinforced their original venture concepts, even in the face of environmental shifts and declining firm performance. Comparisons of the firms revealed the importance of founders’ identities. Two founders saw themselves as “revolutionaries” building novel ventures to drive radical change. In contrast, two sets of founders saw themselves as “discoverers” identifying new opportunities and exploiting them to build successful businesses. We propose that these identities contributed to the firms’ inertia and flexibility primarily through the mechanism of identity affirmation. Acting in a manner consistent with their self-views, revolutionary founders committed to and actively reinvested in radical venture concepts, rejecting potentially adaptive changes that they felt compromised novelty. In contrast, discoverer founders prioritized experimentation and change in reaction to shifting conditions. We propose an emergent framework exploring how, in a nascent industry, a founder’s identity can set off self-reinforcing cycles of firm inertia or flexibility.