Abstract
Nascent ventures struggle to connect to providers of resources that are pivotal for their survival and growth, such as capital and talent. Organizational endorsement helps these ventures to increase their visibility and perception of their value in the eyes of the resource providers and therefore to overcome their liability of newness and improve their legitimacy. In this paper we investigate the e ffect of endorsement on the success of nascent ventures to access the required resources. We demonstrate the effect of endorsement and propose conditions that make this e ffect stronger for some nascent ventures. We leverage a unique dataset of 1,391 nascent ventures that have applied to participate in pitch events hosted by a venture development organization (VDO) founded by the Royal Family in the UK. We confi rm our central hypothesis on the positive impact of endorsement on the success of the selected nascent ventures to acquire investment ex post the pitch event. Moreover, we find that the endorsement signi ficantly benefi ts ventures at their medium level of maturity (i.e. their stage of product or service development) and/or located in environments with low munifi cence (i.e. availability of resource providers). Our fi ndings provide more granular insights into the mechanics of endorsement as a specifi c form of organizational sponsorship.
Published Version
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