Abridged Research Program

I approach entrepreneurship as the study of how ideas become incorporated into markets. My research program is organized into three areas, selection and entrepreneurship, public innovation and commercial entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial finance.

Selection & Entrepreneurship. In this work, I study how events in entrepreneurial processes give rise to staged selection events that foster opportunities to advance theory in entrepreneurship. For example, for a venture to receive financing from external sources entrepreneurs typically must first seek funding and then investors must decide to fund it. In a paper published in Management Science (coauthored with Scott Shane and Frederic Delmar) we show that entrepreneurs and investors systematically select ventures for financing based on different criteria. Therefore, to understand why ventures are differentially likely to receive funding, theory and methodology must appropriately address the staged nature of the process. In a paper published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal with doctoral candidate Mike Ciuchta, we provide a general survey of the importance of selection in entrepreneurship. I am continuing to advance this work.

Public Innovation & Commercial Entrepreneurship. I am studying the software industry to examine how technological innovation and entrepreneurship differ.  My first paper on this topic is currently under review. In the paper, using a database comprised of over 200,000 observations I find that outputs produced by non-commercial innovators complement, instead of compete with, outputs produced by commercial entrepreneurs. This implies that entrepreneurs harness outputs produced by non-commercial innovators to improve their products, while non-commercial innovators typically produce outputs that are less aligned with the interests of consumers. My work in this area is ongoing. In a new paper I am investigating why some innovations tend to be introduced by non-commercial innovators while others are introduced by commercial entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial Finance. Marc Junkunc and I are examining how the characteristics of ideas pursued by entrepreneurs influence aspects of IPO transactions. In a paper recently published in Management Science, after controlling for potentially confounding factors such as firm-age and profitability, we find that the liquidity of entrepreneurs who form high technology firms are more constrained from realizing profits at IPO than other entrepreneurs. In our ongoing work we are examining factors that determine characteristics of the top management team at IPO.

Due to shortcomings in federal and commercial databases that limit their use for examining scholarly questions in entrepreneurship, my research requires substantial database development. For example, my work with Marc Junkunc on IPOs required the coding of thousands of SEC filings and my software research tracks weekly changes in the entrepreneurial activities of over 4,000 individuals for several years. My work in software involves the tracking through time data on over 20,000 software packages created by thousands of software developers.