The Relationship between Founder Team Diversity and Innovation Performance: The Moderating Role of Causation Logic

This article examines two factors commonly thought to be potential contributors to business success, namely diversity and the logic that drives entrepreneurial decision making. The empirical context is new ventures, and data collected using a survey of new ventures are used to investigate the contribution of founder team informational diversity to innovation performance, as well as the moderating effect of the degree of causation logic used in decision making.The findings confirm that founder team informational diversity is positively related to both idea generation and the implementation of ideas into new products or services. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the relationships between founder diversity and both idea generation and realized innovation are moderated by the logic of entrepreneurial decision making. The relationship between founder team informational diversity and idea generation is stronger when decision making is based on strong causation logic, while the relationship between founder team informational diversity and realized innovation is stronger when decision making is based to a lesser degree on causation logic.