Microfoundations and the birth of a firm's identity: How entrepreneurs deal with routines to entrench their start-up in an ecosystem

International audienceHow to shape successful ventures; ensure that an entrepreneur’s journey will lead to create viable businesses over time? It is argued that organizations are built on habits and routines in place that are defined as dispositions to follow certain behavioral tendencies motivated by appropriate contexts and environments (Abell et al., 2007; Becker, 2012; Cohen, 2012; Nelson & Sidney, 1982). Prior work stressed that the individual identity, founders’ habits influence the emergence of organizational routines. Bryant (2014) argues that founders can better manage the initial imprinting process thus enhancing a venture’s capacity to adapt.Besides the founders’ identity and their imprinting memories, ventures’ identity is influenced by its corresponding ecosystem. For instance, to promote and ensure firms’ creation, local ecosystems create incubators, co-working spaces oriented to support the entrepreneurship activities. The principal objective is to help premature companies to grow and become independent, strengthen their offer, help them launching their business. For instance, in Europe, the incubation and mentoring offer drastically increased over the last years aiming to produce successful firms that will leave the incubator financially viable and independent. How do start-ups make use of these structures to actually build their identity, shape their routines? With this purpose our research seeks to understand which role the corresponding ecosystems play on the start up’s collective identity creation, definition of its routines and whether and how the ecosystem along with founders ‘strengthen’ ventures identity