Co-founder team formation in new ventures
Most new ventures are founded by teams rather than solo entrepreneurs ; numbers worldwide, including in Belgium, suggest about 70-75% is founded by teams (Collewaert et al., 2016; Wasserman, 2012). Founding teams can be defined as “two or more individuals who pursue a new business idea, are involved in its subsequent management, and share ownership.”
Much remains to be learned about how these teams are formed in the first place since extant literature focuses on features of already established teams, neglecting their origins and the research that does exist suffers from two main shortcomings.
First, research on founding team formation has typically been conducted within disciplinary silos, taking either a predominantly economic (resource seeking) view or psychological (interpersonal attraction) view. Each of these perspectives implies a different key criterion on which prospective (co-)founders are selected, namely the extent to which they can bring in more and complementary resources to the team/venture, or fit personally with the other co(-founders) based on similar values, motivations or other characteristics.
Discuss how entrepreneurs select co-founders and obtain a rich characterization of the processes behind the formation of founding teams of new, innovative ventures.