Article by Baris Istipliler receives Best Paper Designation at AOM Conference 2026

The article titled “Divided Attention and Venture Performance: An Attention-Based View of Hybrid Entrepreneurship” investigates how the limited attentional resources associated with hybrid entrepreneurship impact venture performance, as well as the factors that mitigate this relationship.

Authored by Baris Istipliler (University of Mannheim), Samuel Adomako (University of Birmingham) and Mujtaba Ahsan (San Diego State University), this study explains why hybrid entrepreneurship, where founders split their time between paid employment and running a venture, can hinder start-up performance. Using the Attention-Based View, the authors argue that founder attention is a limited resource. When attention is divided, founders are less able to monitor operations, coordinate resources, and respond quickly to business needs. As a result, ventures use their available capacity less effectively, which reduces overall performance.

The study also highlights factors that can weaken this negative effect. Larger top management teams and a bigger employee base help share responsibilities and reduce reliance on the founder’s direct attention, improving capacity utilization. In addition, the authors show that the value of high capacity utilization depends on how innovative the venture is. For highly innovative firms, focusing too much on efficiency may limit experimentation and flexibility, reducing its performance benefits.

These ideas are supported by analyses of panel data from more than 20,000 venture-year observations of German start-ups collected between 2013 and 2020.

The working paper is designated as a Best Paper (i.e., chosen to be among the top 10% of all the papers submitted to the ENT division in a given year) in AOM 2026 and included in the conference proceedings in an abridged form. The 6-paged abridged version can be accessed under the following link: https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMPROC.2026.151bp

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