Entrepreneurial action often stems from individual judgment about the value potential of market opportunities. Where entrepreneurs direct their search for and evaluate profitable opportunities has long received scholarly consideration. Attention has been increasingly directed toward how search is conducted, with a distinction between “cognitive” search, where actors are driven by a prior belief about the linkage between actions and outcomes (i.e., “learning-before-doing”) and “experiential search,” in which the solution must be realized through experimentation, trial-by-error, or “learning-by-doing.” We examine founders’ experiential search for market applications in uncertain technological environments. In doing so, we seek to uncover how founder background, experience, and depth of knowledge affect the firm’s degree of experiential search. We examine a sample of technology-oriented start-ups founded by researchers from six major US research universities to investigate the role of experiential search in university technology commercialization. In our context of academic entrepreneurship, we find that founding teams that draw from multiple disciplinary perspectives in selecting a market application to pursue exhibit a broader cognitive map of the technological landscape and thus expend more effort in the experiential search process than do teams with less varied backgrounds. Conversely, teams that include individuals with prior commercial experience conduct less experiential search, although this evidence is less strong. The inclusion of students appears to lead to greater experiential search by the founding team. Our findings add new understanding to the application of search heuristics by entrepreneurial firms in technology commercialization.

中文翻译：

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试水：学术创业中的创始团队组成和搜索启发法

创业行动往往源于个人对市场机会价值潜力的判断。企业家如何引导他们寻找和评估盈利机会长期以来一直受到学术界的关注。人们越来越关注如何进行搜索，“认知”搜索与“体验搜索”之间存在区别，“认知”搜索是行动者受到关于行动和结果之间联系的先验信念（即“先学后做”）的驱动。 ”，其中解决方案必须通过实验、反复试验或“边做边学”来实现。我们研究了创始人在不确定的技术环境中对市场应用的经验探索。在此过程中，我们试图揭示创始人的背景、经验和知识深度如何影响公司的体验搜索程度。我们研究了由美国六所主要研究型大学的研究人员创立的技术导向型初创企业样本，以调查体验式搜索在大学技术商业化中的作用。在我们的学术创业背景下，我们发现，在选择市场应用时，从多个学科角度出发的创始团队对技术领域表现出更广泛的认知图谱，因此在体验式搜索过程中比多样化程度较低的团队花费更多的精力。背景。相反，包含具有先前商业经验的个人的团队进行的体验式搜索较少，尽管这一证据不那么有力。学生的加入似乎会导致创始团队进行更多的体验式搜索。我们的研究结果为创业公司在技术商业化中应用搜索启发法增添了新的理解。