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This article provides an inductive empirical investigation into how university high-technology spinout companies develop. A university spinout (USO) is defined as a venture founded by employees of the university around a core technological innovation which had initially been developed at the university. Data were collected using in-depth face-to-face and telephone interviews with representatives from the nine USO, as well as each of their financial investors and seven associated universities over the twelve-month period from July 2001 to July 2002. Critical junctures refers to a complex problem that occurs at a point along a new high-technology venture's expansion path preventing it from achieving the transition from one development phase to the next. Critical junctures occur precisely because of the conflict between a USO venture's existing level and type of resources, capabilities and social capital, and those required to perform in the proceeding phase of development. As a result of the idiosyncratic development of each USO through each development stage, deficient social capital, resource weaknesses and inadequate internal capabilities were all dependent upon the unique evolutionary path each USO followed.

A common theme in the entrepreneurship literature is that founders experience greater freedom than those working in established organizations. Much of this literature relies on a contrastive sense of freedom: either "freedom from" structures of control or "freedom to" realise personal potential. We advocate a more expansive account of founder freedom drawing on existentialism. Freedom is the central concern of existentialist writers and this diverse group emphasises not just the opportunities of freedom but its intrinsic and perpetual challenges -- what one might call the "dark side" of freedom. This is not a contrastive "freedom from" or "freedom to" but a more fundamental state of "being free". We develop a broader conceptualization of founder freedom and derive implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business school deans act as boundary spanners in hybrid academic leadership roles They must synchronize university and business school rhythms. How they do so shapes the nature of the role they enact and their subsequent career trajectories. We explore how "willing hybrids" enact an executive role oriented toward university demands, whereas "incidental hybrids", or "first amongst equals", orient themselves toward business school demands. Alternatively, those deans who occupy the middle ground become either "blended hybrids" or "one-off hybrids", depending on whether they successfully synchronize university and business school rhythms. We explore how enactment of the different roles shapes career trajectories after a dean's first term of office. In doing so, we identify five distinct career trajectories: "in and back", when the post holder returns to their previous role; "in and up", when they move into a central university role; "in and continue", when their term of office in the deanship is renewed in the same institution; "in and across", when they move to lead another business school; and "in and out", when they (in)voluntarily exit higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant research into organizational ambidexterity, little research examined antecedents of its constituent components, exploration and exploitation. Drawing on Attention Based View of the firm, we examine three antecedents that reflect its three key principles: the principle of focus of attention; the principle of situated attention; and the principle of structural distribution of attention. Specifically, we examine the influence of top management team (TMT) composition, whether or not the firm has a clear vision, and the extent to which organizational attention is focused on investments in R&D and continuous improvement. We empirically validate our model on a sample of 422 small and medium sized enterprises in the UK and demonstrate that there are important differences in the antecedents of exploration and exploitation. Our findings support the view that in order to build ambidextrous organizations, the antecedents of exploration and exploitation need to be analyzed separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on organizational identification (OI) predominantly considers established organizations, where OI is understood as membership. Less has been written about OI in organizations in their very earliest stages - start-ups. We view start-ups as an interesting case because start-ups cannot provide the same historical basis for attributions of identity, or conceptions of membership, as mature organizations; instead members are oriented to an imagined future organization. At the same time, founders and founder members can identify extremely strongly with start-ups, in part because they want to realize potentialities that can only come when starting a business from the roots up. Considering the case of OI in start-ups prompts a deeper consideration of OI and membership as existential phenomena. We do so using an existentialist perspective grounded in Sartre's Being and Time, which enables us to theorize the conceptual category of the start-up, and extend understanding of OI more generally, richly connecting identity, membership, and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the institutional diffusion and maintenance of third stream activities in U.K. higher education. Employing a longitudinal research design, involving archival, survey and contemporary interview data, we explore the institutional work employed to diffuse and maintain institutional practices. We find that actors develop flexible strategies, re-shaping discourse and metrics to adapt to stakeholders' changing demands the potentially less than compelling economic logic for an institution. Furthermore, actors work to align these institutional elements so that they reinforce one another in supporting institutional maintenance. Our study opens avenues for future institutional research to examine resilience in institutional theory, suggesting that some elements must adapt to changing demands in order for institutionalized practices to be maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly appointed leaders need time to learn about their organizations and imprint their ideas. Paradoxically, average tenure rates for leaders have fallen dramatically, well below the levels that are required for leaders to be successful. In this paper, we follow Zhang's (2008) lead to exploring how asymmetric information between the owner (principal) and leader (agent) shapes leader tenure. We contribute to the literature by developing a model of asymmetric information and leader tenure which extends Zhang's (2008) work on adverse selection, and heeds Zhang's call to explore the link between moral hazard and leader tenure. We validate our model, using duration analysis, on a sample of 132 newly appointed leaders in the English premier league (1996-2010). From our analysis we are able to draw the following conclusions. First, relating to adverse selection, we found that the number of disruptions, measured as the number of recent dismissals before appointment, have an inverted U-shaped relationship with the hazard of dismissal of the newly appointed leader. In addition, we find that newly appointed inside successions have a greater hazard of dismissal than newly appointed outside successions. Second, relating to moral hazard, we found that the presence of a split-leadership function leads to a greater hazard of dismissal; and that higher levels of the leader-specific investments lowers the hazard of dismissal of newly appointed leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research into social identity has neglected to consider how salient identities are mobilized in leadership contexts and the complicating influence of professional group membership on individual ability to engage in leadership roles. Using the illuminating case of nursing we consider the challenges faced by professionals who are traditionally subordinate to more powerful groups, and whose group culture may be orthogonal with expected leadership behaviors. Through semi-structured interviews we determine the different types of identity work employed by these individuals to overcome internal conflict and create new leadership identities, with varying levels of effectiveness. Our research contributes to and develops existing knowledge concerning leadership and identity and illuminates the way in which subordinate professionals mediate de-coupled identities. We extend the literature on social identity through insights about the process of enacting social identity in a professionalized context where professionals are asked to take on managerial leadership roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]