Are You Experienced or Are You Talented?: When Does Innate Talent versus Experience Explain Entrepreneurial Performance?

By Charles E. Eesley, Edward B. Roberts. 2012

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We explore whether entrepreneurial performance is due to innate talent or the accumulation of entrepreneurial experience. Using a novel data set with multiple observations of founding attempts per individual, we generate a unique measure of entrepreneurial talent. In contrast to prior findings, the relative importance of experience versus talent changes with the context. When the current market or technology is familiar, experience dominates. However, when the venture context is unfamiliar, talent is more important. Individuals with experience and talent handle both familiar and unfamiliar aspects and may extract more from a given level of experience. The findings advance our understanding of how the drivers of venture performance shift with the broader technological and industry environment and places limits on when experience aids performance. Copyright © 2012 Strategic Management Society.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a89eb9eeda103b9a492702fcbdf80922392e64bf

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Citations in the corpus

Top management teams and the performance of entrepreneurial firms (2013, background): “Still others succeed when they have savvy strategies or top-notch employees (e.g., Beckman and Burton 2008; Eesley and Roberts 2012).”
Strategy and Uncertainty: Resource-Based View, Strategy-Creation View, and the Hybrid Between Them (2021, background): “By contrast, when top management teams have expertise across industries or experience in highly uncertain markets, they are often better able to update their mental models and adapt their products (Eesley & Roberts, 2012; Furr, 2019).”
Re-thinking research on born globals (2015, background): “What is more important: talent or experience (Eesley & Roberts, 2012)?”
The Effects of Business Failure Experience on Successive Entrepreneurial Engagements: An Evolutionary Phase Model (2018, background): “…beliefs and behaviors, and the tendency to attribute failures to the actions and inactions of others mean that the same old belief and values systems, procedures, and structures accustomed to in the past are likely to be imported to the new business at the formation phase (Eesley & Roberts, 2012).”
Practice Makes Perfect: Entrepreneurial-Experience Curves and Venture Performance (2014, unknown): “Perhaps the most salient indicator of context-specific entrepreneurial experience identified in the literature is industry similarity (Delmar and Shane, 2006; Eesley and Roberts, 2012; Klepper, 2001).”
Should I quit my day job?: : A hybrid path to entrepreneurship (2014, methodology): “For entrepreneurial experience, we followed recent research (e.g., Eesley & Roberts, 2012; Gregoire & Shepherd, 2012; Hmieleski & Baron, 2009; ToftKehler et al., 2014) and measured it as the cumulative number of businesses started.”