Against the background of the post-heroic perspective known from leadership and entrepreneurship research, we shift the focus from the luminary entrepreneur and his or her team to the entrepreneurial firm and its employees. For our analysis we investigate how three antecedents increase the innovativeness of start-ups: (i) the start-ups’ external relationships, (ii) the maintenance of such relationships through entrepreneurs’ and employees’ networking, and (iii) the different hierarchical levels in this process. In a survey-based study, drawing from the data of 98 entrepreneurs and 261 employees in start-ups, multilevel moderated mediation analysis is applied. According to our results, inter­organizational relationships are particularly effective for entrepreneurial innovativeness if networking practices on the employee level are in place. Herein, the collective involvement of employees turns out to have a stronger mediation effect than the individual efforts by the entrepreneur. These findings support “another” post-heroic perspective that is quite distinctive from previous entrepreneurship research, which considers context but predominantly captures networking as the activity of an entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial core team.

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