Mirjam KnockaertGhent University | UGhent
Mirjam Knockaert
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83
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Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (83)
Science parks are a type of organizational sponsorship initiative aimed at generating resource-munificent environments through the provision of bridging and buffering services. While extant research has studied the relationship between these services and firm outcomes, it has neglected to provide insights into when tenant firms utilize these servic...
This study investigates the board of directors’ contribution to opportunity development in high-tech ven- tures. Based on the dynamic managerial capabilities per- spective, we argue that more experienced boards will con- tribute more to opportunity development. Furthermore, building on the attention-based view, we argue that this effect will be mod...
Greed is an excessive form of self-interest that leads individuals to pursue material wealth and immaterial desires with little or no concern for the well-being of others. While the literature suggests that greed results in managers acting unethically, a situational strength perspective suggests that this may not always be the case. Therefore, this...
The entrepreneurial journey is a complex and challenging process, and many entrepreneurs experience venture distress, i.e., they realize that their venture is underperforming based on the threshold they had set for it. While it is generally acknowledged that distressed ventures should be exited, preferably as fast as possible, many entrepreneurs fa...
When planning is possible, as in predictive environments, comprehensive contracting is not only desirable, but also useful. However, under conditions of fundamental uncertainty, as is the case in non-predictive environments, incomplete contracting approaches likely prevail. In this study, we explore how trust in such environments affects the way in...
This review aims at synthesizing and assessing the literature on human resource management (HRM) in entrepreneurial firms. Our review over the time period 2004–2020 is relevant as entrepreneurial firms have a central role in the economy and are important for technological advancement and employment. Furthermore, managing entrepreneurial firms diffe...
The positive effect of venture capital (VC) on firm growth has been widely documented. However, there exists a large variation in growth of VC-backed firms, with only a small number reaching a substantial size. Prior studies have linked the variation in growth of VC-backed firms to differences in resource endowments of the entrepreneurial top manag...
Alongside the increased efforts of universities to commercialize academic science, technology transfer (TT) ecosystems have developed within or close to research universities across the world. Such ecosystems are composed of various organizational entities, such as science parks, incubators, and TT offices. In this paper, we study the organizationa...
The social entrepreneurship literature increasingly acknowledges that the board of directors is of major importance in dealing with the multiple goal pursuit of social enterprises. Using a team production perspective, we study the relationship between stakeholder knowledge in the board and the engagement of the board in counseling and decision-maki...
While science parks represent one of the most important policy initiatives to stimulate firm development and growth, their contributions are still highly debated. This paper takes a novel customer-oriented approach to disentangle the contributions science parks provide to their tenants. Particularly, we qualitatively explore when and how science pa...
Past research has shown that new firms can facilitate resource mobilization by signaling their unobservable quality to prospective resource providers. However, we know less about situations in which firms convey multiple signals of different strengths—that is, signals that are more- or less-correlated with unobservable firm quality. Building on a s...
Over the past decades, public policy has promoted the establishment of science parks to support the development and growth of technology-based firms and, as such, spur economic prosperity. However, despite the worldwide proliferation of science parks and scholarly interest, their contribution is yet to be fully understood. This paper presents the c...
Despite the increased interest in innovation ecosystems, few studies have assessed the extent to which the proclaimed benefits from participating in such ecosystems also occur, and under which circumstances they do occur. Uniting the literature on organizational interdependence and social exchange theory, we assess the behavioral and output additio...
This chapter argues that new venture team (NVT) processes are relatively ill-understood in the entrepreneurship literature, and describes various theoretical and empirical research avenues that may be pursued in order to improve our understanding of these processes. It then focuses on the widely established input-processes-outcome (IPO) framework....
Corporate governance research has extensively studied the relationship between outside board characteristics and outside board involvement. We add to this literature by investigating the extent to which interactions between outside board members and the top management team (TMT) affect the functioning of the outside board. Building on conflict theo...
Most universities committed to the commercialization of academic research have established technology transfer offices (TTOs). Nonetheless, many researchers bypass these TTOs and take their inventions directly to the marketplace. While TTO bypassing has typically been portrayed as deliberate and undesirable behavior, we argue that it could be unint...
Using a sample of academic scientists, we show that promotion focus interacts with the work and family environments to predict academic scientists' entrepreneurial intentions. Concretely, we find that the relationship between promotion focus and entrepreneurial intentions is particularly strong when scientists' parents have owned a business and whe...
Following the growing interest in sustainability and ethics, organizations are increasingly attentive to accountability toward stakeholders. Stakeholder representation, obtained by appointing board members representing different stakeholder groups, is suggested to be a good ethical practice. However, such representation may also have nefarious impl...
In this paper, we unite upper echelon theory and the attention based view of the firm to provide a deeper understanding of which top management team (TMT) characteristics, directly, or indirectly through board service involvement, result in TMT effectiveness in high-tech start-ups. In order to do so, we build upon data collected from 103 Norwegian...
Over the past decades, universities have increasingly become involved in entrepreneurial activities. Despite efforts to embrace their ‘third mission’, universities still demonstrate great heterogeneity in terms of their involvement in academic entrepreneurship. This chapter adopts an institutional perspective to understand how organizational charac...
This paper studies the determinants of enterprising aspirations of university-based research scientists, using an approach which factors in individual and organizational characteristics. Specifically, we provide an understanding of the individual and departmental characteristics that affect the research scientist's aspirations to engage in patentin...
Three distinct fields of gene manipulated biotechnology have so far been economically exploited: medical biotechnology, plant biotechnology and industrial biotechnology. This article analyzes the economic evolution and its drivers in the three fields over the past decades, highlighting strong divergences. Product and market characteristics, affecti...
Although academic entrepreneurship has taken place in some U.S. universities for many decades, it is only over the past few decades that there has been an increased interest by universities worldwide to engage in their third mission related to entrepreneurship and economic development. Recently, researchers studying academic entrepreneurship have i...
This study utilizes a multilevel approach to both estimate the relative importance of individual, subunit, and organization effects on entrepreneurial intentions in academia, as well as to investigate specific factors within the subunit effect and their interactions with other levels. Using a dataset of 2,652 researchers from 386 departments in 24...
Early stage high-tech firms are confronted with a number of challenges related to the homogeneous and technical nature of the start-up team. Attracting outside board members can alleviate these challenges and consequently enhance firm performance. Building on team production and human capital theory, we study how outside board human capital affects...
The purpose of this paper is to understand how individuals’ “passion orchestra” is related to entrepreneurial intentions. We study our research question in academia, where research scientists are increasingly required to simultaneously engage in traditional research and commercialization activities. Drawing on role identity theory and passion liter...
Over the past decades, universities have increasingly become ambidextrous organizations reconciling scientific and commercial missions. In order to manage this ambidexterity, technology transfer offices (TTOs) were established in most universities. This paper studies a specific, often implemented, but rather understudied type of TTO, namely a hybri...
Boards in early stage high tech firms have an important role to play through their involvement in service tasks. Building on the attention based view of the firm and self-efficacy theory, we investigate the role of top management team (TMT) and board chair characteristics as antecedents of board service involvement (BSI). Studying a sample of 117 N...
Not all venture capital investors value patents during the selection process in the same way; the majority, but not all, value patents positively.
Over the past decades, universities have increasingly become involved in entrepreneurial activities. Despite efforts to embrace their ‘third mission’, universities still demonstrate great heterogeneity in terms of their involvement in academic entrepreneurship. This papers adopts an institutional perspective to understand how organizational charact...
Whereas the provision of R&D subsidies has been central to public policy for many years, governments have recently become increasingly involved in stimulating cooperation for innovation and R&D. In many countries, financial support for technology intermediaries has become one of the key measures of indirect public support. However, little research...
For the past number of years, academic entrepreneurship has become one of the most widely studied topics in the entrepreneurship literature. Yet, despite all the research that has been conducted to date, there has not been a systematic attempt to analyze critically the factors which lie behind successful business spin-offs from university research....
Boards in early stage high-tech firms have an important role to play in strategic decision making. Building on the attention based view of the firm and self-efficacy theory, we study the role of top management team (TMT) and board chair characteristics as antecedents of board strategic involvement (BSI). Studying a sample of 117 Norwegian academic...
Early stage high tech firms are confronted with a number of challenges and liabilities which are largely related to the often homogeneous and technical nature of the start-up team. Attracting outside board members relieves some of these barriers and can be expected to lead to superior firm performance. Building on human capital theory, and controll...
Drawing upon signaling theory and the attention-based view of the firm, we study if signal receivers attend differently to different types of signals when they interact with different firms or operate under different market conditions. Our theorizing and empirical analysis is situated in the context of the follow-on fundraising activities by privat...
Knockaert M. and Spithoven A. Under which conditions do technology intermediaries enhance firms' innovation speed? The case of Belgium's collective research centres, Regional Studies. So far little research has analysed the role of technology intermediaries in enhancing firms' innovation speed. This research aims to fill this gap by studying a spec...
Firms have become increasingly open towards collaboration to become more innovative. Opening up the innovation process and letting knowledge percolate through the boundaries of the firm is however not a guarantee to success. Many small and medium sized firms simply have insufficient resources to collaborate on innovation and lack in-house absorptiv...
New technology-based firms (NTBFs) are considered to contribute significantly to the economy. Given that NTBFs face many challenges
and liabilities, the academic literature has tried to identify how public policy measures could help to overcome challenges
related to innovation, amongst other factors, by identifying NTBFs’ need for innovation suppor...
Building upon self-efficacy and collective effort theories, we study the association between the selection behavior of venture
capitalists and their involvement in value adding activities. We argue that investors, who prioritize different characteristics
of a business proposal during selection, will be more or less confident of their own abilities...
An extensive stream of literature has studied incubators, however, few researchers have focused on business centres, which typically host a broader set of firms, including medium- and low-tech firms. This paper studies the role of business centres in the networking capabilities of their residents and the impact of residence at a business centre on...
The increased pressure put on public research institutes to commercialize their research results has given rise to an increased academic interest in technology transfer. We assess under which conditions tacit knowledge transfer contributes to the performance of academic spin‐offs. Using an inductive case study approach, our evidence suggests that t...
In this paper, we unite upper echelon and conflict theories to provide deeper understanding of how top management team (TMT) characteristics, and the interplay between TMT characteristics and board strategic involvement, result in venturing team effectiveness. In order to do so, we build upon data collected from 103 Norwegian academic spin-outs. Th...
Our research seeks to develop understanding of the factors explaining venture capital investment managers’ attitudes towards
investment in the unique context of academic spin-outs. We provide a novel integration of both VC fund characteristics and
investment managers’ human capital characteristics with a unique hand-collected dataset of 68 early st...
We address the question: do technology investors differ from traditional investors? Employing a conjoint methodology, we identified 28 technology investors from a sample of 68 European early stage investors. Comparing the two groups of investors we found that: (1) technology investors were not more likely to receive public funding than traditional...
The success of technology transfer depends in part on new technology-based firms (NTBFs) accessing venture capital (VC). Yet, little is known about venture capitalists' selection processes in this context. We examine the heterogeneity in the selection behaviour of VCs using a unique hand-collected dataset comprising 68 European early-stage high-tec...
There has been an increased interest in technology transfer activities. This increased interest is inspired by the observation that not all generated knowledge gets translated into commercial products or processes, which is generally referred to as the knowledge paradox. Many researchers have studied academic spin-offs. Within the resource based vi...
The discussion on open innovation suggests that the ability to absorb external knowledge has become a major driver for competition. For R&D intensive large firms, the concept of open innovation in relation to absorptive capacity is relatively well understood. Little attention has; however, been paid to how both small firms and firms, which operate...
Research shows that universities and research institutes have become increasingly involved in the creation of academic spin-offs (e.g. Wright et al., 2003). Little is however known about the performance of these academic spin-offs and what is driving this performance. By using an inductive case study design, this study aims to provide a better unde...
This study examines the perceived contributions of external boards to the survival and success of high-tech start-ups from a resource dependency perspective. Existing research on the role of boards has nearly exclusively focused on large firms. What is less clear from the extant literature, however, is the extent to which external boards are actual...
The discussion on open innovation suggests that the ability to absorb external knowledge has become a major driver for competition. In the case of inbound open innovation, companies screen their environment to search for the appropriate technology and knowledge and do not exclusively rely on in-house R&D. A key precondition is that firms dispose of...
Governments have increasingly become involved in stimulating cooperation for innovation and R&D and have less focused on direct R&D subsidies. One set of initiatives is targeted at providing financial support for technology intermediaries. In this paper, we shed light on when technology intermediaries contribute to learning or networking outcomes g...
Boards in large organizations have been subject to much empirical research, however, boards in start-ups have been a largely neglected research topic. The dearth of research into boards in start-up companies is surprising as since the early nineties high tech start-ups have increasingly become multi-stakeholder firms due to the increased availabili...
In this paper, we study which VC firm and investment manager related factors drive the VC’s attitude towards academic spin-out investing by taking an agency and human capital perspective. In order to do so, we use a unique hand-collected dataset involving 68 investment managers working at early stage VCs in Europe who were interviewed and provided...
In this paper, we study which VC firm and investment manager related factors drive the VC’s attitude towards academic spin-out investing by taking an agency and human capital perspective. In order to do so, we use a unique hand-collected dataset involving 68 investment managers working at early stage VCs in Europe who were interviewed and provided...
We analyze how mid-range universities can contribute to industrial change through the transfer of tacit and codified knowledge in the areas of spin-offs; licensing and patents; contract research, consultancy and reach-out; and graduate and researcher mobility. We use archival, survey and interview data relating to mid-range universities in mid-rang...
Over the last decades, venture capital investment management has considerably become interested in high-tech investing. Despite this higher interest, no clear analysis exists of who these high-tech VCs are, and how they differ from traditional VCs. Studying selection behaviour of VCs using a conjoint methodology, we identified 28 high-tech investor...
In this article we examine the influence of formal technology transfer from a public research organization (PRO) on the amount
of capital a spin-off raises at start-up and the increase in capital post start-up. We examine these relationships using a
unique sample of 135 spin-offs from PROs across five European countries. Our findings suggest that s...
Board composition in large organizations has been subject to much empirical research, however, little attention has been focused on board composition in start-ups, and more specifically high tech start-ups. This lack of research is surprising given that many high tech start-ups have multiple equity stakeholders such as venture capitalists or public...
This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the neglected but important issue concerning the relationship between the human capital and fund characteristics of venture capitalists and post-investment follow-up behavior in early stage high tech investments. We found no indication that involvement in monitoring activities by the investment manager is...
This study examines the selection behaviour of 68 European early stage high tech VCs. In particular, we examine whether or not these VCs exhibit heterogeneity in their selection behaviour. To examine these issues we employ a conjoint analysis methodology. Our results indicate that VCs exhibit substantial heterogeneity in investment selection behavi...
This study looks at the investment behavior of 68 early stage venture capital funds in Europe. Using a conjoint analysis model, it lets venture capitalists make investment decisions in 27 well selected business proposals. The technique combines the advantage of post hoc studies (well coded and easy to analyze data) with those of the real time studi...
The increased pressure put on public research institutes to commercialize their research results has given rise to an increased academic interest in technology transfer in general and science based entrepreneurial firms specifically. By building on innovation speed and knowledge literatures, this paper aims to improve understanding of how tacit kno...
Despite the attention given to venture capital (VC) and venture capital fund performance over the past decades, our understanding of what drives VC fund performance remains limited. This is mainly caused by a lack of data on VC fund performance, and the fact that, by consequence, mainly indirect measures have been used to assess it, including the n...
New Technology Based Firms (NTBFs) are considered to contribute significantly to the economy. As a result, these firms have received extensive attention from academics over the past decades. Given that NTBFs are faced with many challenges and liabilities, the academic literature has tried to identify how public policy measures could help to overcom...
Despite the vital role high growth firms play in the economy, our understanding of drivers of growth intentions remains limited. We investigate the relation between cognitive styles and an individual’s growth intentions using a sample of 251 researchers at the University of Oslo. Our study indicates that cognitive style, defined as the characterist...
Employing a risk perception perspective, this paper studies the link between the investment manager’s human capital and his or her attitude towards the appropriability regime in the business proposal, and more specifically whether or not the technology is patent protected. Even though many researchers acknowledge the benefits related to patenting,...
We investigate the effects of promotion focus on the entrepreneurial intentions of a group of 208 research scientists based in a university in Norway. Previous researchers have suggested that the risk taking and creativity which promotion focus is linked to should predict entrepreneurial behavior. However, the results supported our assertion that p...
It is widely recognized that firms do not operate in isolation but that they are embedded in networks of relationships with other actors (e.g. Granovetter 1985). Although previous research has shown that external search strategies are important for firm performance (e.g. Laursen and Salter, 2003), we know little about the factors that influence the...
Intentions are generally accepted as the single best predictor of planned behavior (Bagozzi et al., 1989). Understanding intentions is especially valuable in the case the focal phenomenon is rare, obscure, or involves unpredictable time lags, which is typical the case in entrepreneurship (MacMillan and Katz, 1992). Given the importance of entrepren...
Projects
Project (1)
Given the prevalence of venture distress and failure in business life, it is surprising that these topics have only received limited attention in entrepreneurship research. To advance the existing research on this topic, my doctoral dissertation aims to shed light on how venture distress (or underperformance) evolves over time, which impact it has on entrepreneurs’ private and professional lives, and which role different actors (such as family, creditors and external advisors) play in such distress process through the following studies:
1) A qualitative, longitudinal study that explores the dynamics through which entrepreneurs cope with prolonged venture distress and how this affects their resilience over time.
2) A quantitative study that investigates how the interplay between venture and family characteristics at the time of venture distress relates to entrepreneurs’ persistence with their ventures two years later.
3) A quantitative study that sheds light on the implications of venture distress on involved entrepreneurs, their families and their future careers.
My research is in collaboration with Dyzo, a Flemish organization that provides free business advice to entrepreneurs of rather small, underperforming firms. Depending on the entrepreneur’s help request and the situation at private and firm level, Dyzo guides the entrepreneur either toward firm recovery, or toward an exit, hereby trying to limit the costs for the entrepreneur and his or her family.