Listed SMEs and innovation: the role of founding board members
- PDF / 755,977 Bytes
- 34 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 66 Downloads / 225 Views
Listed SMEs and innovation: the role of founding board members Carmen Barroso-Castro 1 & Marta Domínguez de la Concha Castañeda 1 Mª de los Ángeles Rodríguez Serrano 1
&
Accepted: 11 November 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Drawing from the resource-based view of the firm, Penrosean theory, and the resource dependence theory, it is argued in this study that the characteristics of directors are key factors for achieving the resources that listed SMEs will require to develop innovation, a scenario that often highlights the necessary replacement of the founding board members. We test our proposed relationships with a sample consisting of all the companies listed on the MAB (Alternative Spanish Stock Market) between 2010 and 2017. Our results offer new insights into the role of the founding board members, highlighting the need for the professionalization of the governance of these SMEs, by appointing independent outside directors and by decreasing the proportion of founding members on the board. Likewise, our results showed that this relationship is moderated by the age of the company. Keywords Board of directors; innovation . Entrepreneurial SMEs . Founders JEL classifications G34 . G30 . L29
Introduction In the present, highly turbulent business environment, innovation provides the main competitive advantage for all types of companies (Adams et al. 2006; Duran et al.
* Carmen Barroso-Castro [email protected] Marta Domínguez de la Concha Castañeda [email protected] Mª de los Ángeles Rodríguez Serrano [email protected]
1
Department of Management and Marketing, Universidad de Sevilla, Ramón y Cajal, n° 1, Sevilla, Spain
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal
2016) and, in particular, for both Small and Medium-Size Enterprises (SMEs) (Gao and Hafsi 2015; Rammer et al. 2009). At the same time, however, innovation can mean that the company must face certain risks, uncertainties and costs (Balkin et al. 2000) that can hamper this decision. These barriers can be overcome through the skills, resources and networks of board members (Bammens et al. 2011). Thus, the literature has shown that corporate governance affects innovation and R&D (Arzubiaga et al. 2018a; Sapra et al. 2014). On the other hand, previous research has argued that the presence of the founding members of a firm is key to its success, especially in SMEs (Preisendörfer et al. 2012; El Shoubaki et al. 2019) and has provided some insights into founders and innovation (Ortega-Argilés et al. 2005). These investigations have concluded that the founding member’s perceptions, education, and previous experience can all affect the innovation levels within the firm (Colombo and Grilli 2010; Gao and Hafsi 2015). However, the influence of founding members acting as directors (Block 2012; Ortega-Argilés et al. 2005) has rarely been addressed in the literature (Wang and Song 2016). There are two main arguments that will help to explain the relationship between founding board members and innovation: the resou
Data Loading...
