Self-Leadership and Overcoming the Time Resource Constraint: Accelerating Innovation for New Products

Abstract

Arguably the scarcest resource for startups in the commercialization of new products is time. Self-leadership-the self-direction and self-motivation-of the founder may help us to manage time scarcity by improving innovation speed. With limited structure or templates to follow in product development efforts, self-leadership could be a critical resource for technology entrepreneurs under closing windows of opportunities. Drawing from a sample of founders in the high-technology sector, controlling for a variety of venture-related attributes, higher levels of self-leadership was positively related to innovation speed, and even more positively related to innovation speed when entrepreneurs commercialize less radical products. We highlight self-leadership as an important behavioral and motivational resource for speeding product development in the new technology-based venture context. We also shed light on the value of self-leadership in accelerating the development of less radical, or incremental, product innovations. Our findings have implications for both entrepreneurship research and the self-leadership literature.

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