Institutional entrepreneurial orientation: Beyond setting the rules of the game for blockchain technology

Abstract

Regulations keep evolving on currency-based blockchain technology, making it difficult for entrepreneurs within this realm to find a home. Going beyond temporal regulations and traditional metrics to help entrepreneurs evaluate formal institutional environments, we apply and extend the theoretical framework of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) to the institutional level (termed institutional EO) to index an institution's innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking towards blockchain technology. Evaluating a country's institutional EO allows entrepreneurs to understand how embedded the institution is within a certain technology (in this case blockchain technology), which in turn, signals to entrepreneurs longer-term havens in which to locate to develop and commercialize the technology.