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New DRUID Working Paper
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New working paper is now available. It is a paper co-authored with Toke Reichstein (from Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London) called “Are You Experienced? Prior Experience and the Survival of New Organizations“. An early draft was presented at the 10th International Schumpeter Society Conference at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy in June 2004.
This paper investigates the relationship between the level of experience of managers and founders, and the likelihood of survival of their new firms. We take advantage of a comprehensive dataset covering the entire Danish labor market from 1980-2000. This is used to trace the activities of top ranked members of start-ups prior to their founding, and follow the fate of these firms. More specifically, we compare the survival of spin-offs from surviving parents, spin-offs from exiting parents, and other start-ups.
Michael S. Dahl and Toke Reichstein (2007), "Are You Experienced? Prior Experience and the Survival of New Organizations", Industry and Innovation. Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 497-511. ISSN: 1366-2716.
The role of informal networks in the development of regional clusters has recently received a lot of attention in the literature. Informal contact between employees in different firms is claimed to be one of the main carriers of knowledge between firms in a cluster. This paper examines empirically the role of informal contacts in a specific cluster. In a questionnaire survey, we asked a sample of engineers in a regional cluster of wireless communication firms in Northern Denmark a series of questions on informal networks. We analyze whether the engineers actually acquire valuable knowledge through these networks. We find that the engineers do share even quite valuable knowledge with informal contacts. This shows that informal contacts represent an important channel of knowledge diffusion.