Seth Berger ( W’89, WG’93), Managing Director of Sixers Innovation Lab, discusses how the accelerator supports Philadelphia entrepreneurs by providing office space, health care, food, and even housing.…Read More
Entrepreneurs leading digital ventures are often advised to be adaptable. However, research on how to pursue adaptable strategies and whether such strategies improve short- or long-term digital venture outcomes is sparse.…Read More
The lean start-up approach has garnered tremendous amount of interest in recent years and has become mainstream among entrepreneurs. However, this practitioners’ conversation has been largely decoupled from the broader academic literature in management and technology strategy. …Read More
Jules Pieri, author of How We Make Stuff Now and CEO of The Grommet (a site that launched SodaStream, Bananagrams, and more) has advice for entrepreneurs on prototyping, branding, and selling.…Read More
The winners of the 2018 Hult Prize at Penn introduce PEER, their platform connecting underprivileged youth with mentors of similar backgrounds, and share what they learned along the way to the regional competition.…Read More
Tanvi Kapur, Ishir Seth, and WenTao Zhang discuss their plan to prevent catheter-associated infections in hospital patients.…Read More
Startups are increasingly turning to the incumbent firms in their industries for venture capital. However, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of how these relationships influence the way they innovate. …Read More
Joel Sadler, Founder and CEO of the education tech startup Piper, shares how his upbringing ingrained in him the ideals of universal design and resourcefulness that he brings to his company.…Read More
Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more and this view has become standard in the empirical innovation literature. Using an NPE-derived dataset with patent-specific revenues we find that the relationship of citations to value in fact forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations at the high end of value than in the middle.…Read More
Scott Belsky, author of “The Messy Middle,” elaborates on the struggles that developing businesses have in their middle stages and how to get past them.…Read More
Given the large and growing role of academic entrepreneurs and inventors via patents, start-up development, and university-industry relationships, understanding how funding sources may impact academic scientists’ incentives is a crucial area for innovation research, particularly in the biomedical sciences. …Read More
What’s the effect of FDI on firms in cities receiving foreign investment? Agglomerating or crowding out? This paper tries to answer this question by studying local firm creation using Chinese Business Registration data. …Read More
Experimentation is the center of a fascinating debate among entrepreneurship practitioners. Inspired by the lean startup, much current practice advocates the intense use of experimentation. Conversely, a large entrepreneurship tradition emphasizes the importance of design and planning. …Read More
Crowdfunding allows founders of for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures to fund their efforts by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet, without standard financial intermediaries. Crowdfunding has been drawing substantial attention from policy makers, managers, and entrepreneurs, but relatively little notice from academics.…Read More
This special issue links “National Systems of Innovation” with “Social Entrepreneurship” to showcase how social entrepreneurship enables the diffusion of new technologies to make a social impact and engender “creative destruction” through the value generating activities of economic actors ranging from individuals, micro-enterprises to large organizations. …Read More
This paper examines how social entrepreneurship, at both the firm and institutional levels, fosters innovation and economic development. It draws on concepts from national innovation systems (NIS), complexity, ecosystems, and social entrepreneurship research to develop a framework for forming innovation ecosystems via social entrepreneurship. …Read More
Does higher internet speed drive entrepreneurship and innovation? If there is an effect, is it driven by an increase in the overall number of entrepreneurs, or in the probability of their success? …Read More
We study information aggregation in organizational decision-making for the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. We introduce a formal model of voting where agents face costly tacit information to improve their decision quality.…Read More
In this project, we explore the impact of startup firms’ social media activities on their entrepreneurial financing performance. Social media can mitigate information problems in entrepreneurial financing in two ways.…Read More
The road to successful commercialization is a steep and difficult one — a fact which entrepreneurs know all too well. But like hikers who use a zig-zag trail to ease their ascent up a mountain, entrepreneurs may be able to more effectively reach their goals by taking an indirect route.…Read More
