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Export propensity, export intensity and firm performance: The role of the entrepreneurial founding team

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Abstract

We investigate how the characteristics and experience of the entrepreneurial founding team (EFT) affect the export orientation and subsequent performance of the businesses they establish, while allowing for the mutually reinforcing relationship between exporting and productivity. Using a sample of UK technology-based firms, we hypothesise and confirm that the set of EFT human capital needed for entering export markets is different from that required for succeeding in export markets. Commercial and managerial experience helps firms become exporters, but once over the exporting hurdle it is education, both general and specific, that has a substantially positive effect. The overall pattern of human capital effects on productivity is similar to those for export propensity. We also find evidence that productive firms are more likely both to enter export markets and to be export intensive, and that exporting boosts subsequent firm productivity.

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Notes

  1. Terminology in the literature varies somewhat here, including new technology-based firms (Storey & Tether, 1998b), and new venture firms (Zahra et al., 2000).

  2. Butchard (1987) identified 15 manufacturing and four service sectors as high technology, based on two criteria: firms with high R&D intensity (measured as R&D expenditure over the amount of sales, or value added), and firms with a high proportion of scientists and engineers who spend the majority of their time in R&D activities, in relation to the rest of the industries. However, this classification could not be adopted here, as the categorisation was carried out according to the NACE-70 four-digit system which has now been replaced by the ISIC Rev.3 or, for the case of the UK, the UK SIC classification. Most importantly, the adoption of a high-tech sector categorisation based on data more than 20 years old (the time of Butchard's survey) would not have picked up the creation and expansion of new industrial sectors.

  3. The latter was also compared with the DTI innovation report Competing in the global economy: The innovation challenge (December 2003).

  4. We are grateful to the ONS for providing the table for each sector according to companies’ size and age.

  5. Given that 66% of the population of UK companies have less than five employees and 81% have less than nine (ONS, 03/92), the sample was calibrated with higher weight given to the larger companies in order to have a statistically representative sample of that class. The “other software and supply” sector was also calibrated in order to reduce the 0–4 size category, as it accounted for 76% of the total number of companies in that category. This was done as a large number of single-person consultants operate in that sector, and it was not possible to identify them ex ante.

  6. Technical education includes education in engineering, science, bioscience and IT disciplines, and business education in a variety of business specialisations, such as marketing, accounting/finance, business and management, international business.

  7. Technical experience includes experience in R&D, engineering, manufacturing and IT, and commercial experience includes experience in sales/marketing.

  8. In order to test the robustness of the variable specifications, apart from the proportion of entrepreneurs in an EFT with technical, commercial, managerial or sector experience, dummy variables on whether each of the above types of specific experience existed in an EFT were also used. The results remained unchanged, and are available upon request.

  9. In practice, Roper et al. (2006) observe that the signs and significance levels obtained using the fractional response model are very similar to those obtained using tobit.

  10. Defined as λ=2(ln Lprobit+ln Ltruncation−ln Ltobit). Test statistics were found to be 43.04 and 53.06, with critical values at the 5% level of 38.89 and 41.34, respectively.

  11. Data come from a truncated distribution if values in a certain range are not observed, such as data for non-exporters in the export intensity equation. In such circumstances, simply using OLS regression on the non-limit observations is inconsistent, and a maximum likelihood estimator is therefore used.

  12. p-values: 0.62 and 0.47 for the two models in the order they appear.

  13. Note that the standard Hausman endogeneity tests often used in cross-sectional studies are meaningless here, as the explanatory variables for exporting that correspond to 2001 are different in terms of the values that the same variables have in 2004. Endogeneity is removed by design from the current study.

  14. In order to take into account the fact that entrepreneurs can acquire general experience and related skills after foundation of the firm, general experience was also defined as the average number of years of general experience in an EFT up to the point of the survey, rather than up to a firm’s incorporation date. Results remained unchanged, and are available upon request.

  15. There is also the issue of the human capital of individuals subsequently joining the EFT. We considered this possibility in detail by collecting information in the survey on the number of individuals that entered the entrepreneurial team; only 0.5% of the sample (two firms) each reported just a single member entering the team. Therefore this is not a cause for concern.

  16. We also estimated all equations replacing the “number of founders” variable with a dummy variable for firms founded by a single entrepreneur. The coefficient on this dummy variable was insignificant, and other coefficients in the estimations were unaffected.

  17. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this line of inquiry.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Panagiotis Ganotakis

  2. Economics and Strategy Group, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK

    James H Love

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  1. Panagiotis Ganotakis
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Correspondence to James H Love.

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Accepted by Ulf Andersson, Area Editor, 21 May 2012. This paper has been with the authors for two revisions.

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Ganotakis, P., Love, J. Export propensity, export intensity and firm performance: The role of the entrepreneurial founding team. J Int Bus Stud 43, 693–718 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2012.16

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