Advisory boards in entrepreneurial companies

The aim of the chapter is to explore the role and tasks of the advisory boards from the perspective of current corporate governance literature. From a practical perspective the chapter has potential to improve the understanding of the role of advisory boards for entrepreneurs and their start-ups. The three dominating paradigms of corporate governance literature for roles of boards _ agency theory, resource dependency theory and stewardship theory _ have been used as a framework for the study, focusing on the monitoring role, service role and the strategy role of boards. The chapter is based on empirical data collected over ten years, including approximately 100 case studies of advisory boards for start-ups and early growth stage companies in Denmark. The results indicate that the stewardship perspective is most important and that advisory boards are active in this context in terms of a strategy role. On the other hand, the agency theory perspective and the role of monitoring has limited importance. Further research is needed to explore different types of advisory boards in different contexts.