New research by Anders Sørensen in Stanford Business
New research by ECON professor Anders Sørensen, leader of Centre for Innovation, and Stanford University professor Kathryn Shaw, Centre for Innovation's Advisory Board member, shows that serial entrepreneurs’ companies outpace their novice counterparts in sales and productivity.
Shaw and Sørensen compared the success of novice and serial entrepreneurs in Denmark between 2001 and 2013.
Shaw and Sørensen looked at sales, employment, and productivity data for roughly 215,000 Danish firms run by entrepreneurs. (Entrepreneurial markets between Denmark and the U.S. are comparable, though Denmark has a smaller high-tech sector.) Most of these companies were small businesses; serial entrepreneurs, who are defined as having founded more than one firm between 2001 and 2013, ran about 20% of the companies in the sample. “Among these small businesses, is there a gain to being a serial entrepreneur?” asks Shaw. “And, if so, why?”