Career Imprints from Diverse Institutional Settings: a Comparative Study of Academic and Non-academic Partnered Ventures in Technopolis

This research focused on the effects of prior experiences based on the imprinting theory that how individual-level imprints are transferred to the organizational level. The research attempted to answer the question of how owners’ career imprints affect the performance of ventures. Ventures operating in the technology sector were categorized according to their academic and industry background. The results showed that although academic-partnered ventures were found to generate more patents, their performance is lower than non-academic partnered ventures. This research has theoretical and practical contributions providing results that show different institutional contexts lead to different outcomes through the occupational imprinting effect.