Timely Creation of New Organizations - Imprinting Effects of Entrepreneurs' Initial Founding Decisions

In an attempt to explain why some new organizations are established faster than others we adopted a perspective according to which a timely organizational emergence can be understood and predicted by viewing it as conditioned by the initial decisions of nascent entrepreneurs regarding the opportunities they pursue. Using a large dataset of individuals who are in the process of building their ventures in the United States, and who have been followed up on an annual basis as they go through this process, we have found empirical evidence to conclude that initial opportunity characteristics exercise imprinting effects on the time it takes to create new organizations. That is, our empirical observations provide evidence that the characteristics of emerging ventures at the intersection of pursued opportunities and individual entrepreneurs have an impact on the time it takes to establish a new organization. Given the novelty of the relationships investigated in this study, coupled with the empirical support for some of our hypotheses, we believe our findings can shed new light on the understanding of imprinting forces for timely organization creation