Founder Imprinting and Entrepreneurship

This research will explore the effect of founder imprinting on long-term outcomes for UK businesses. It will seek to establish the extent to which the strategic choices (the imprint) that the founding entrepreneur makes at start-up subsequently influences how the business develops over time. In particular we will seek to identify robust empirical evidence relating to the following 3 research questions;

1. How long does this founding entrepreneurial imprint continue to impact on business outcomes?
2. Does the strength of this founding entrepreneurial imprint change (strengthen or weaken) over time?
3. Compared to other aspects and characteristics of the business, how important is the basic founding imprint in explaining long-term outcomes

The potential impact of this research is substantive as policy-makers in the UK have begun to reallocate their resources away from policies directed at increasing the entrepreneurial population per se, and towards policies directed at entrepreneurial ventures with high growth potential. And this research would directly address this latter question of who, in terms of what types of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures, to target the governments increasingly scarce resources in this policy area at. There is also the potential for business support agencies and advisors to bring the research evidence into their more practical offers to new and young businesses. At the academic level, this research also has the potential to extend our understanding of long-term outcomes of new business start-ups and define new avenues for future research.