An Indirect Effect of Founder-manager Type on Firm's Product Novelty: The Case of Japanese Fishing Tackle Industry

Many firm founders and managers are using firm’s own product, in software, network service, and consumer product industries. This is known as “dogfooding.” In academic world, the user entrepreneur is a related construct.... [ view full abstract ]

Many firm founders and managers are using firm’s own product, in software, network service, and consumer product industries. This is known as “dogfooding.” In academic world, the user entrepreneur is a related construct. The study of user entrepreneurs has shed light on the importance of the founder-manager’s needs information and the unique firm creation model.

In this study, we compared user entrepreneurs with maker entrepreneurs (who create new firm on the product originally developed for business purpose). We intend to find whether they differ in terms of the extent to which the new business differs from founder’s prior working industry (industrial difference), to which the founder’s extent of product use changes after startup (switch of use behavior), and firm’s product novelty. By using the data from Japanese fishing tackle manufactures and with a serial mediation analysis, we found that, relative to maker entrepreneurs, user entrepreneurs have higher industrial difference, which however relates to the negative switch of use behavior that finally brings the lower product novelty.