Amphibious Entrepreneurs and the Emergence of Organizational Forms Walter W. Powell Kurt W. Sandholtz Stanford University Key words: Emergence, imprinting, models of organizing, recombination, transposition Forthcoming, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. We are grateful to Andrew Abbott, Steve Barley, Diane Burton, Michael Cohen, Daisy Chung, Neil Fligstein, Hokyu Hwang, Sarah Kaplan, Joachim Lyon, John Levi Martin, Maja Lotz, Cal Morrill, Jason Owen-Smith, James Mahoney, John Padgett, Paolo Parigi, Charles Perrow, Monica Prasad, Craig Rawlings, and Lourdes Sosa for helpful comments, as well as audiences at the Academy of Management meetings, the University of Chicago, Cornell, London Business School, the University of Mannheim, Northwestern, Brigham Young University, Sciences Po, UC – Berkeley, UC – Davis, and the Networks and Organizations workshop at Stanford. Siddharth Mishra provided valuable research assistance. Two anonymous reviewers and special issue editors Alan Meyer and Kathy Eisenhardt made many useful suggestions. Author order is alphabetical as a matter of convention. This paper was a fully collaborative effort. Direct correspondence to Woody Powell at
[email protected]. ABSTRACT: We study the emergence of new organizational forms, focusing on two mechanisms – reconfiguration and transposition – that distinguish the founding models of the first 26 biotechnology companies, all created in the industry’s first decade, between 1972 and 1981. We analyze rich archival data using hierarchical cluster analysis, revealing four organizational variants of the dedicated biotech firm (DBF). Three were products of reconfiguration, as executives from Big Pharma used past practices to incorporate new science. One DBF variant resulted from “amphibious” scientists who imported organizing ideas from the academy into their VC-funded start-ups.