Social capital building and new business formation: A case study in Silicon Valley

The article tracks potential employees (team members), university scientists (advisors) and venture capitalists (investors) who participated in a two-day workshop at Stanford University. The three groups are identified as either having preexisting professional interactions with the other two groups prior to attending the initial workshop, or having met for the first time at the workshop. The groups are then tracked over time for entrepreneurial activity. Positive relationships are found for groups who had preexisting professional interactions for founding a firm after the workshop. The article argues that innovation accelerators, such as the Stanford University workshop, offer invaluable social capital building opportunities to accelerate needed trust and tacit knowledge requisite for new firm formation.