The Impact Of Founding Team's Prior Experience And Transactive Memory System On The Competitiveness Of New Ventures

Entrepreneurial activity has played an important role in stimulating economic growth, promoting employment and improving per capita income. However, under the transformation of economic system, new ventures often confront many resource constraints and uncertainties, which led to the high failure rate of entrepreneurial activity. Founding team as a key component of new ventures, its competitiveness is vital for the success of start-ups. In the dynamic environment, team competitiveness is mainly embodied in the difference of effective resource utilization efficiency and stability. In order to keep stability, founding teams must make corresponding adjustments quickly to adapt to the change of external environment, so the team's adaptive capability is vital for the survival of new ventures. What's more, if founding teams can integrate and apply the knowledge and resources among team members creatively, they will seize the opportunities to development more easily.Many successful entrepreneurs have rich working experience, which can help entrepreneurs to integrate resources and build social networks, and have a great impact to new venture's adaptive process. Accordingly, drawing from the resource-based review and team prior experience, this paper conduct a multi-case study to construct the theoretical framework first. Analyzing the data collected from 4 founding teams of the new high-tech ventures in a development zone of China, we find that founding team with rich working experience would decrease team members' powerlessness, ultimately promote the team's adaptive capability.Next, by fostering team creativity through its antecedents-transactive memory system(TMS) and instant knowledge integration capability, we aid in better respond to surprises in dynamic envionment to seize the opportunities to development.We test our theoretical framework with an experiment study for 239 students, and the result suggest that instant knowledge integration mediated the relationship between TMS and team creativity. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implication of our findings.