Entrepreneurial Team Assembly

This chapter provides a review of the scholarly literature on entrepreneurial teams and team formation. It pays special attention to two emerging areas of research that present many promising opportunities for future work. First, the chapter discusses the role of resource transfer in the context of start-up firms. It argues that an understanding of the antecedents and consequences of the founding process would be significantly advanced by more explicit theorizing and effort to empirically identify the specific types of resources entrepreneurial team members bring to start-up firms. It highlights one recent advancement in this space—work that has focused on a team’s ability to transfer customer and client relationships from the parent to start-up firms—and provides an outline of open research questions in this realm. Second, the chapter provides a primer on a recent methodological advancement—the use of two-sided assortative matching models—that can be applied to entrepreneurial team assembly to alleviate ongoing concerns that team formation is fundamentally an endogenous process. It demonstrates how these models can be applied using a wide variety of founder, cofounder, and early team member attributes, including an individual’s ability to transfer customer relationships. Importantly, it proposes that synergies emerging from the use of two-sided assortative matching models to study a broader set of team member attributes that include resource transfer will open promising new avenues for future research.