Do external founder CEOs place strategic emphasis on innovation? An upper echelons perspective

Abstract

Research compares the influence of two types of chief executive officers (CEOs) on a firm's innovation strategy: founder CEOs, who founded the firms they lead, and professional CEOs, who worked in corporations at different levels before being selected as CEOs. We introduce a third type of CEO, external founders, who founded other ventures before being appointed as CEOs. Drawing on upper echelons theory, we propose that the unique combination of external founder CEOs' values and knowledge predisposes them to place less strategic emphasis on innovation than founder CEOs do but more than professional CEOs do. Heterogeneity among external founder CEOs may be due to nuances related to their exposure to professional investors in and successful exits from the ventures they founded. We assess our hypotheses empirically using the innovation-related speech in investor communications and patent applications of 1637 CEOs of 789 S&P 500 firms from 2000 to 2019. We find that external founder CEOs emphasize innovation less than founder CEOs do, but contrary to our hypotheses, also less than professional CEOs do. However, certain nuances in external founder CEOs' founding experience bring their strategic emphasis on innovation close to that of founder CEOs. We extend upper echelons research by providing a fine-grained view of the role of (founding) experience and its qualitative nuances in shaping CEOs' strategic decision-making.