Prof. Dr. Christoph Ihl

Scholars have suggested that autonomy can lead to better entrepreneurial team performance. Yet, there are different types of autonomy, and they come at a cost. We shed light on whether two fundamental organizational design choices—granting teams autonomy to (1) choose project ideas to work on and (2) choose team members to work with—affect performance. We run a field experiment involving 939 students in a lean startup entrepreneurship course over 11 weeks. The aim is to disentangle the separate and joint effects of granting autonomy over choosing teams and choosing ideas compared with a baseline treatment with preassigned ideas and team members. We find that teams with autonomy over choosing either ideas or team members outperform teams in the baseline treatment as measured by pitch deck performance. The effect of choosing ideas is significantly stronger than the effect of choosing teams. However, the performance gains vanish for teams that are granted full autonomy over choosing both ideas and teams. This suggests the two forms of autonomy are substitutes. Causal mediation analysis reveals that the main effects of choosing ideas or teams can be partly explained by a better match of ideas with team members’ interests and prior network contacts among team members, respectively. Although homophily and lack of team diversity cannot explain the performance drop among teams with full autonomy, our results suggest that self-selected teams fall prey to overconfidence and complacency too early to fully exploit the potential of their chosen idea. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on organizational design, autonomy, and innovation.

@article{boss2023organizing,
  title     = {Organizing Entrepreneurial Teams: A Field Experiment on Autonomy over Choosing Teams and Ideas},
  author    = {Boss, Viktoria and Dahlander, Linus and Ihl, Christoph and Jayaraman, Rajshri},
  journal   = {Organization Science},
  volume    = {34},
  number    = {6},
  pages     = {2097--2118},
  year      = {2023},
  doi       = {10.1287/orsc.2021.1520}
}

Entrepreneurs face the challenge of having to conform to gain legitimacy, while at the same time differentiating themselves to gain competitive advantage. We show how entrepreneurs can craft an entrepreneurial narrative to succeed in this task among the user audiences empowered to evaluate their products.

@article{vossen2020more,
  title     = {More than Words! How Narrative Anchoring and Enrichment Help to Balance Differentiation and Conformity of Entrepreneurial Products},
  author    = {Vossen, Alexander and Ihl, Christoph},
  journal   = {Journal of Business Venturing},
  volume    = {35},
  number    = {6},
  pages     = {106050},
  year      = {2020},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.jbusvent.2020.106050}
}

What motivates university scientists to identify practical applications for their research results and consider having them patent-protected? A wealth of research points towards a complex blend of factors, including organizational antecedents, social norms and personal-level expectations. Few studies, however, have attempted to investigate the effect of concrete incentives from the perspective of individual scientists’ decision-making. In this paper, we operationalize the propensity to patent and commercialize research results as the intention to submit an invention disclosure filing. We use scenario-based conjoint analysis to capture university scientists’ preference structures for different incentive policies. Results indicate that direct and indirect financial incentives are dominant drivers. In addition, a grace period that would allow for patenting and publishing in parallel and the inclusion of patents in academic performance assessments are worth considering, whereas the specific setup of the technology transfer organization and public recognition of achievements in form of an award appear to have limited effect. However, preferences for incentives and hence their effectiveness vary significantly across academic disciplines and ranks as well as with scientists’ working experience, patenting experience and research orientation.