Resilience strategies in product innovation in founder-led high-tech firms: The role of founders’ identity and attention focus

The article examines the role that the identity of founders plays in explaining the resilience strategies adopted by their high-tech firms during the pandemic. We focus here on a particular area of activity – product innovation – which plays a crucial role in high-tech firms. We examine 15 high tech firms located in the US or Western Europe. We find that the founder’s role identity shapes how their firm respond to crisis: while technical experts follow adaptation and coping strategies to respond to the crisis with respect to how they organise their product innovation activities, founders with an entrepreneurial identity engage in a combination of adaptation and/or innovation strategies. We explain these findings by considering the attention focus of entrepreneurs. First, we show that founders’ role identity shapes their focus of attention, with entrepreneurs considering the broader context, market and internal processes, and technical experts focusing on resource availability, market and internal processes. Second, we find that the attention focus of founders directs their firms’ resilience strategies differently depending on the role identity of their founders. Our findings bring important contributions to entrepreneurial resilience research in by demonstrating the role that identity of founders play in explaining resilience strategies in founder-led high-tech firms, and by unveiling the mechanism (attention focus) through which it happens.