Unraveling the nexus of academic founders and innovation performance: The suppression effect of ownership structure within Sci-Tech enterprises

This paper aims to examine the influence of academic founders on firm innovation performance from the perspective of equity distribution in entrepreneurial teams. Based on the prospectus data of 466 science and technology enterprises that applied for registration on the STAR Market from 2016 to 2020, we use textual analysis to classify founder identities into academic founder, technical founder, and business founder. Our results show that the performance of technical innovation in Sci-Tech enterprises is optimal for academic founder-led firms, followed by technical founders, and finally business founders. Ownership structure suppresses the positive direct relationship between the academic founder and innovation performance.