Repeated sampling of this cohort over time could test if different human founders’ capital factors and technology commercialisation strategies affect longer term performance, including value at exit, or if the same human capital factors explain more or less founders’ of the variance in performance. A limitation of this study is that it ignored founder's social capital. While this factor is less likely to vary for ventures nurtured in a specialist incubator program, founder’s social capital does affect a funding chances (Greene et al., 1999; Honig et al., venture’s 2006). Further research could tease out signals of social capital factors such as reputation (Harrison et al., 2004), for example, whether academic institutional prestige moderated the academic status effect on external investment. Two human capital factors that featured in empirical studies summarised in Table 1 were omitted from our research design: entrepreneurial mindset and learning ability. These are complex constructs that were not measured in the first survey; they may or may not have affected our results. Recent work by Baumol et al. (2009) casts doubt on the proposition that high levels of technical education affects entrepreneurial mindset and learning ability, so we have no reason to suppose that these unobserved characteristics are driving our results. However, future studies should take these constructs into account. Acknowledgements We are grateful to Prof. Zvi Eckstein, Dr. Shlomi Parizat, Mr. David Prumov, and Ms. Rina Pridor for providing us with the data from the 2001 survey performed for the Chief Scientist Office of the Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry so that this study could be undertaken.
Repeated sampling of this cohort over time could test if different founders’ human capital factors and technology commercialisation strategies affect longer term performance, including value at exit, or if the same founders’ human capital factors explain more or less of the variance in performance. A limitation of this study is that it ignored founder's social capital. While this factor is less likely to vary for ventures nurtured in a specialist incubator program, founder’s social capital does affect a venture’s funding chances (Greene et al., 1999; Honig et al., 2006). Further research could tease out signals of social capital factors such as reputation (Harrison et al., 2004), for example, whether academic institutional prestige moderated the academic status effect on external investment. Two human capital factors that featured in empirical studies summarised in Table 1 were omitted from our research design: entrepreneurial mindset and learning ability. These are complex constructs that were not measured in the first survey; they may or may not have affected our results. Recent work by Baumol et al. (2009) casts doubt on the proposition that high levels of technical education affects entrepreneurial mindset and learning ability, so we have no reason to suppose that these unobserved characteristics are driving our results. However, future studies should take these constructs into account. Acknowledgements We are grateful to Prof. Zvi Eckstein, Dr. Shlomi Parizat, Mr. David Prumov, and Ms. Rina Pridor for providing us with the data from the 2001 survey performed for the Chief Scientist Office of the Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry so that this study could be undertaken.
Founder's_Human_Capital.docx