1999/06/01 by Toby E. Stuart, Ha Hoang, Ralph C. Hybels · 2,788 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Accounting #Affect (linguistics) #Alliance #Business #Capitalization #Corporate Finance and Governance #Corporate venture capital #Entrepreneurship #Equity (law) #Finance #Firm Innovation and Growth #Industrial organization #Initial public offering #Marketing #Private Equity and Venture Capital #Quality (philosophy) #Sample (material) #Venture capital
paper · doi:10.2307/2666998
published in Administrative Science Quarterly 44(2), 315-349 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 1999/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
This paper investigates how the interorganizational networks of young companies affect their ability to acquire the resources necessary for survival and growth. We propose that, faced with great uncertainty about the quality of young companies, third parties rely on the prominence of the affiliates of those companies to make judgments about their quality and that young companies “endorsed” by prominent exchange partners will perform better than otherwise comparable ventures that lack prominent associates. Results of an empirical examination of the rate of initial public offering (IPO) and the market capitalization at IPO of the members of a large sample of venture-capital-backed biotechnology firms show that privately held biotech firms with prominent strategic alliance partners and organizational equity investors go to IPO faster and earn greater valuations at IPO than firms that lack such connections. We also empirically demonstrate that much of the benefit of having prominent affiliates stems from the transfer of status that is an inherent byproduct of interorganizational associations.