The Start of Team Start-Ups: Collective Dynamics of Initiation and Formation of Entrepreneurial Teams

This study aims to describe and understand the start of team start-ups through answering why and how team entrepreneurship (TE) is initiated, how teams form, and what kinds of criteria are used in team building. While the above topics have been examined by many scholars, we aim to elaborate new insights into understanding the very first steps of initiating a new venture by an entrepreneurs’ collective. We employ a qualitative multiple-case study approach and analyze individual and group interview data from four high-technology team start-ups through inductive thematic analysis. We find that TE starts with an impetus established by a collective desire, collective value orientation, collective demand, and collective encouragement to TE. The impetus concretizes in coming together of team members where one or some need to take initiative to form the team, and search for members with specific criteria for membership that include not only technical but social-psychological dimensions. The study suggests that emergence of entrepreneurial opportunities at the collective-level might be distinctive from the individual-level. It contributes to researchers, prospective entrepreneurs, investors, policy-makers, and educators’ understanding of TE as a versatile and dynamic phenomenon where individual and group levels of analysis and technical and social-psychological aspects intertwine.