Entrepreneurial Passion, Cognitive Bias, and Technology Commercialization of New Ventures

Introduction

Rapidly realizing technology commercialization is an important way for technological firms to gain and sustain competitive advantage. Zahra and Nielsen (2002) pointed out that the high speed of technology commercialization can be utilized to actively challenge competitors and accelerate learning from customers. Especially under Chinese transitional economy context, the external environment changes rapidly. New ventures need to realize technology commercialization successfully in the window of opportunity and quickly transfer new technologies or ideas into products or services to meet customer needs in the market. Therefore, the speed of technology commercialization is the key for new technological ventures to survive in China.

According to existing research, many scholars have focused on how companies successfully commercialize technologies or ideas from the perspectives of government policies, strategic alliances, human capital, resource integration mechanisms, and knowledge management. However, there is a lack of research on the role of emotional and cognitive factors in the process of technology commercialization. New technological ventures are facing more difficulties in the process of technology commercialization, such as limited resources, lack of market experience, high technical uncertainty, and fierce market competition. These all pose great challenges which require passionate founders to make decisions and execute right strategies to achieve. As an important emotional feature, entrepreneurial passion is considered to be a key driver in the difficult situation, which has a positive effect on self-identity, venture growth or performance, technological innovation, and attracting venture capital investment. It’s also considered as a key factor in supporting new ventures to make technology commercialization decisions under uncertain environment.

Therefore, it is necessary to address this issue to expand the role of emotional factors played in the technology commercialization of new technological ventures. This paper focuses on the effect of the founder's entrepreneurial passion, a psychological characteristic, on the speed of technology commercialization. Besides, we also discussed the role of cognitive factors. Cognitive bias is viewed as a crucial factor leading to the difference in entrepreneurial decision-making in new ventures. Preview researchers analyzed the effect of cognitive bias on entrepreneurial decision-making such as entrepreneurial opportunity identification and evaluation. However, it still lacks the research on the role of cognitive bias in the process of technology commercialization.

Overall, this study will combine individual emotional factors and cognitive bias, explore the effects of founders’ entrepreneurial passion on the speed of technology commercialization based on individual cognitive perspective, and examine the mediating role of cognitive bias in the relationships. We make two main contributions to the entrepreneurship and innovation. Firstly, we extend the understanding of technology commercialization by revealing the effect of founders’ entrepreneurial passion on technology commercialization. Secondly, we provide evidences that founders’ entrepreneurial passion indirectly influences technology commercialization through cognitive bias.