Founder Imprinting: Innovation Performance Differences between Founders Versus Agent CEOS

Abstract

Using founder imprinting literature, we theorize the innovation performance of founder versus agent CEOs. While founder imprinting is a unique mechanism that is exclusively available to founder CEOs, few studies have explored this phenomenon with corporate innovation performance. Previous studies addressing founder imprinting are in smaller context such as family firms. The role of founder imprinting in large publicly traded companies and its mechanisms that impact innovation performance are underexplored. To address this gap in literature, we created a large longitudinal dataset of 2,716 publicly traded companies from 1992 to 2010. We identify hiring board members with technological backgrounds as an initial imprinting condition and long tenured founder CEO with co-working boards as imprinting institutionalizing conditions that enable successful innovation performance of public firms. Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for how founder CEOs can imprint conditions that enhance the innovation performance of large publicly traded organizations.