Conditions in the womb and at birth have increasingly been shown to have long-term effects on people's health and mortality. Similarly, research has found that conditions surrounding the development and launch of new companies may affect whether they become operational and survive.

Organizations founded in adverse conditions appear to have a higher mortality hazard throughout their existence than those born in more robust circumstances. Researchers have dubbed this effect the "density delay", but the results of their studies have tended to be contradictory. In some cases organizations founded in environments with large numbers of competitors (high density) had persistently higher mortality, in other cases they didn't.

Jeroen G Kuilman, Jiatao Li and Ivar Vermeulen set out to sort through the muddle to identify just when density could harm an organization's life chances.

They looked looking closely at the dynamics affecting organizations from the time they begin to organize to the start of their operations - a notion called pre-entry ecologies.

One of their key arguments is that certain levels of density will have different effects depending on such factors as the legitimacy of the population they are entering, the number of organizations and the time at which an organizer is setting up. For example, legitimacy can interact with density to affect resource availability.

"When the density of operational organizations is higher, more training grounds are available, which increases the resource mobilization and enhances the legitimacy of the organizational form," they say. "At low densities, the legitimizing effect on organizational entry will exceed the effect of competition. But as density increases, the legitimizing effect will increase at a decreasing rate, whereas the constraining effect will accelerate."

"As a consequence, population density will have a positive effect on resource availability at low densities, but when density reaches a degree at which the organizational form is taken for granted by resource providers, higher density will only reduce resource availability."

A similar effect will be seen in terms of the number of organizations - a lower density will reduce resource scarcity but a higher density will increase it.

Organizers that have fewer resources to build up their structure prior to launch may end up with a less well-developed structure, which in turn will affect their survival. Time is also a factor here - companies with less time to develop themselves have been found to encounter problems later on, although too much time may mean they are out of alignment with their environment and customers when they finally launch.

Pulling all of these ideas together, the authors propose a framework for investigating the likelihood of organizers transitioning into operational units and their mortality hazard once they do so. They suggest that other density delay models may not have correctly identified the outcomes of populations with low legitimacy in particular, which their model now addresses. They also note that all the studies they looked at tended to focus only on the emergent phase of populations.

In terms of applying their model, "we suspect further disentangling the effects of waiting time, organizer density and organization density could potentially bring out more cases in which increasing organization density at founding actually improves survival rates," they say.

The authors make a strong statement in favor of more research in this area. "Given that established organizations often function as training grounds for new ventures and that entrepreneurs with backgrounds at established firms occasionally take with them their networks of clients and other resources, we would expect the competitive pressure on established organizations to increase with the number of organizers. Organizer density, then, may also have a contemporaneous effect on the growth and mortality rates of operational organizations," they say.