Cognitive Structures and Innovative Attention of Founding Team: A Multi-case Study Based on TMS Perspective

Abstract

Abstract:

Innovation of new ventures often confronts many resource constraints and uncertainties, and the failure rate is relatively high. This discourages the founding teams' willingness to make attempts for innovation, further to say, they even don't attach importance to innovation. As the key decision makers of new ventures, little is known about how founding teams affect their attention to innovation. Drawing from the attention theory and transactive memory system (TMS) perspective, we conduct a multi-case study to explore this gap. Analyzing the data collected from 6 founding teams of the new high-tech ventures in a development zone of China, we find that the teams' TMS have great influence on their search behavior on new information and new knowledge for innovation. Founding teams with strong TMS would promote team members' confidence, social identity as well as the interdependence among them. Meanwhile, strong TMS also contribute to members' risk-sharing and value judgments about innovative behavior, and ultimately affect the team's attention to innovation. Our findings increase the perspectives of innovation research, provide important insight for founding teams' decision-making about innovative activities, and enrich the research about entrepreneurial cognition.

Key words: founding team, cognitive structure, tansactive memory system (TMS), attention to innovation, multi-case study

Ye Zhuxin, Mai Yiyuan. Cognitive Structures and Innovative Attention of Founding Team: A Multi-case Study Based on TMS Perspective[J]. , 2016, 28(4): 225-240.

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