Venture team membership dynamics and new venture innovation

Although pre-entry startup experience is widely recognized as a driver of innovation in new ventures, a core feature of new venture teams is that their membership is fluid. In this article, we theorize and test whether venture team membership fluidity incrementally explains new venture innovation. We also investigate and demonstrate that team fluidity conditions the impact of pre-entry startup experience present at founding. Testing our hypotheses with a cohort of 440 new ventures tracked for 8 years, we find support for the model across a wide range of specifications. Our study advances current understanding of the relationship between pre-entry experience and new venture innovation, as well as novel insights into the central but often overlooked role of team fluidity.