The WAGE Technology Entrepreneurship & Institutions Collaborative explores how organizational contexts influence technology entrepreneurship and how the latter, in turn, influences the creation of markets and institutions that support innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development.

Principal Investigators:

Until the 1980’s, many regions sought to promote economic well-being by encouraging large employers to locate in their area. More recently, regions around the world have sought to create regional growth and social value through aggressively facilitating technology entrepreneurship. Experience indicates that there is likely no single recipe of policy prescriptions and institutional features that will work equally well for all contexts, and this suggests value in understanding the deeper processes that shape technology entrepreneurship.

This research project headed by a cross-university team of faculty within the Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship (“INSITE”) and the Agricultural and Applied Economics Department at UW-Madison tackles two specific questions about world-wide efforts to create value through technology entrepreneurship:

1. How does institutional context drive the extent and type of technology entrepreneurship?
2. How does the pursuit of technology entrepreneurship itself shape the institutional context in which it unfolds?

Key themes to be examined will include:

• The impact of non-commercial motivations for creating and sharing inventions
• The role of flexibility and interpretation as a condition for flourishing technology entrepreneurship
• Types of unanticipated positive and negative outcomes of efforts to promote technology entrepreneurship