Chapter 11 Reconceiving the Gestation Window: The Consequences of Competing Definitions of Firm Conception and Birth Claudia B. Schoonhoven, M. Diane Burton, and Paul D. Reynolds Appearing in: Paul D. Reynolds and Richard T. Curtin (Eds). 2009. New Firm Creation in the U.S.: Initial Explorations with the PSED II Data Set . New York: Springer, pp 219-238. One of the challenges of organizational scholarship is defining when an organization begins to exist. Although the literature often borrows analogies from the biological realm, there is growing recognition that the notions of conception, gestation, and birth are complex constructs when applied to organizations (Cardon et al., 2005). There is increasing consensus around the importance of understanding the process of organizational emergence – referred to as organizational gestation or firm creation in this paper. The start of the gestation period, or “conception,” can be operationalized several ways. One option is the time (date) reported when an individual first begins to give serious thought to a new business, or as the dictionary defines the concept, “the moment at which an idea starts to take shape or emerge.” Conception may also be considered as the point in time (date) when the first action is taken by a founder to start the firm. Another is to identify the time period when a serious effort is made to assemble resources and people (several actions within a relatively short period) to develop the new business. The end of the gestation period is termed an organizational “birth” the point at which a new business entity has been established. 1 The challenge with the concept of organizational “birth” is that few have created a theoretical rationale for when a new firm birth can be said to exist. Organizational scholars appear to assume that the birth construct itself is self evident and not problematic. Indeed most analyses fail to address when a new firm can be said to exist (Katz and Gartner, 1988). Page 1 of 30