Entrepreneurial Groups * Historical Perspectives

* The initial inspiration for this historical review arose during a professional development workshop at the 2007 Academy of Management (AOM) conference in Philadelphia, in which I addressed the past and future of research on entrepreneurial teams. I would like to thank Howard Aldrich, Mark Granovetter, Hans Landström, and Franz Lohrke for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. As always, any errors of fact or interpretation remain those of the author. Introduction To many observers, a focus on entrepreneurial groups – or, more colloquially, venture 'founding teams' – is a thoroughly modern preoccupation. It was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that scholars in business management and policy began to question the image of the heroic individual found in traditional treatments of entrepreneurship. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, the economist Robert Reich (who would become Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor six years later) argued that " to compete effectively in today's world, we must begin to celebrate collective entrepreneurship " rather than " the traditional myth of the entrepreneurial hero " (1987: 78). Some management thinkers had touted the importance of 'team entrepreneurship' as much as a decade earlier (e.g. Timmons 1975, 1979). But a new generation of scholars were the first to call for a systematic program of research that would document the prevalence of entrepreneurial groups, describe their properties, and assess their impact on business performance (e.g. Kamm et al. 1990; Gartner et al. 1994). In a review of developments in entrepreneur research and theory, Gartner and colleagues (1994: 6) noted that " the 'entrepreneur' in entrepreneurship is more likely to be plural, rather than singular ". They offered an expansive definition of the entrepreneurial group, which included owner-managers, investors, organizational decision-makers, family members, advisors, critical suppliers and buyers as possible candidates in the entrepreneur role. Contributors to the management literature have primarily displayed an interest in teams as a contemporary phenomenon. In this chapter, I will suggest that the historical evidence and frameworks that can be deployed to study entrepreneurial groups are far less recent than this literature might seem to suggest. Indeed, the social sciences evidence a long pedigree of research devoted to entrepreneurs and the collective nature of activities surrounding the creation of new organizations (Ruef and Lounsbury 2007). The goals of the chapter are twofold. First, the chapter offers a selective history of entrepreneurial groups, addressing the …