Title: The role of social capital in the growth of innovative nascent firms: the moderating effect of incubators

Authors: Valérie François; Christophe Lafaye; Matthieu Belarouci

Addresses: University of Lille, Cité scientifique, Bl Langevin, 59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq, France ' Institut d'Administration des Entreprises (IAE), University Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, EA 1384-IDP-Institut du Développement et de la Prospective, F-59313 Valenciennes, France ' Institut de Gestion de Rennes – Graduate School of Management (IGR/IAE), University of Rennes 1, UMR CNRS – 6211, 11 rue Jean Macé, 35-708 Rennes, France

Abstract: The concept of social capital is increasingly used in entrepreneurship studies to explain the growth of innovative nascent firms. However, empirical findings about the role of social capital (SC) in the growth of young firms have been contradictory to date. We focused on the relational dimension of social capital and differentiated between internal social capital (ISC) and external social capital (ESC). We analysed the perceived utility - which is rarely used in SC studies - of resources received from the networks of innovative nascent firms in their first six years of existence. We implemented the two-stage least squares (2SLS) analysis to avoid the endogeneity bias. The results indicated that during the early years, nascent firms' external social capital is a decisive resource for growth. This was not the case for internal social capital. We observed that joining an incubator appears to have no impact on either growth or the relationship under study.

Keywords: social capital; innovative nascent firm; incubator; growth.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEIM.2021.119179

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, 2021 Vol.25 No.4/5, pp.326 - 345

Accepted: 05 Jun 2019
Published online: 29 Nov 2021 *

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