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

IF 8 1区管理学 Q1 MANAGEMENT

Research Policy Pub Date : 2025-03-10 DOI:10.1016/j.respol.2025.105215

Denise Fischer-Kreer , Andrea Greven , Mareike Grimm , Malte Brettel

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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.

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理解颠覆性创新的个人层面驱动因素：创始人社会身份的作用

本文采用社会认同视角，论证了创始人的身份取向是颠覆性创新的关键个人层面驱动因素。我们介绍了三种身份类型取向——创始人的达尔文主义、社群主义或传教士身份取向——并提出它们在塑造新的创业创新的破坏性方面发挥着独特的作用。我们对215家创业公司的调查数据进行了检验，这些数据分两批从创业公司创始团队的第一和第二名关键线人那里获得。我们的研究结果表明，与假设不同，创始人的达尔文身份取向对颠覆性创新有积极影响。研究发现，创业者的社群主义认同取向对颠覆性创新没有显著影响，而传教士认同取向对颠覆性创新有显著的正向影响。我们的研究通过在新创企业的背景下观察破坏性创新的个体驱动因素，而不是大多数研究探索的现有企业，从而推动了研究。我们的研究结果对身份-创新关系具有重要意义，并强调了创始人的社会分类与破坏性创新的相关性。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Research Policy MANAGEMENT-

CiteScore

12.80

自引率

6.90%

发文量

182

期刊介绍： Research Policy (RP) articles explore the interaction between innovation, technology, or research, and economic, social, political, and organizational processes, both empirically and theoretically. All RP papers are expected to provide insights with implications for policy or management. Research Policy (RP) is a multidisciplinary journal focused on analyzing, understanding, and effectively addressing the challenges posed by innovation, technology, R&D, and science. This includes activities related to knowledge creation, diffusion, acquisition, and exploitation in the form of new or improved products, processes, or services, across economic, policy, management, organizational, and environmental dimensions.