Understanding individual-level drivers of disruptive innovations: The role of founder's social identity

Abstract

This article adopts a social identity perspective to demonstrate that a founder's identity orientations are key individual-level drivers of disruptive innovation. We introduce the three identity type orientations—a founder's Darwinian, Communitarian, or Missionary identity orientation—and propose they play a distinct role in shaping the disruptiveness of new venture innovations. We examined our predictions with survey data from 215 ventures obtained in two waves from a first and second key informant from the venture's founding team. Our results reveal that a founder's Darwinian identity orientation, unlike hypothesized, has a positive effect on disruptive innovations. We find that a founder's Communitarian identity orientation has no significant effect on disruptive innovations, whereas a founder's Missionary identity orientation has a significant positive one. Our study advances research by viewing the individual drivers of disruptive innovation in the context of new ventures instead of incumbents, which most studies explore. Our findings have important implications for the identity–innovation nexus and underscore the relevance of founders' social categorization for disruptive innovations.