Lukas Mommertz

Lukas Mommertz is a master student of management at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Prior to this he completed his undergraduate studies at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management by obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree.

Through his master thesis, Lukas aims to advance the understanding of the iterative team formation process in the entrepreneurial context. In the case of innovative startups, functional heterogeneity of a founder team is accompanied with diverse benefits. Nonetheless, observable realizations of founder teams show their prevalent (functional) homogeneity even after controlling for prior social ties of co-founders. Addressing this discrepancy, research has solely focused on the decision process of the founder team or lead entrepreneur. This perspective treats the potential co-founder who is to be added as passive and being selected. However, research also suggests that even unilateral preferences of these potential co-founders can influence the eventual composition of the founder team. Therefore, it is practically relevant to study their preferences regarding founding/ coworking with diverse versus similar others to explain the emergence of (functionally) homogeneous teams and potentially develop measures to promote the emergence of more heterogeneous teams.

To address this research question, imaginary lead entrepreneurs (on cards) will be described along attributes such as primary educational background, gender, age etc. and participants (potential co-founders) are supposed to choose their most preferred lead entrepreneur to work with in a discrete choice-based conjoint experiment.