The development of an infrastructure for entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper takes a macroperspective of entrepreneurship, and focuses on the issues and events involved in constructing an industrial infrastructure that facilitates and constrains entrepreneurship. This infrastructure includes: (1) institutional arrangements to legitimate, regulate, and standardize a new technology, (2) public resource endowments of basic scientific knowledge, financing mechanisms, and a pool of competent labor, as well as (3) proprietary R&D, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution functions by private entrepreneurial firms to commercialize the innovation for profit. Although extensive research substantiates the importance of these infrastructure components, they have been treated as externalities to entrepreneurship. By incorporating these components within a single framework, one can systematically examine how various actors and functions interact to facilitate and constrain entrepreneurship. The paper makes three contributions to understanding entrepreneurship. First, I believe that the study of entrepreneurship is deficient if it focuses exclusively on the characteristics and behaviors of individual entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and if it treats the social, economic, and political factors influencing entrepreneurship as external demographic statistics, on the other hand. Popular folklore notwithstanding, the process of entrepreneurship is a collective achievement requiring key roles from numerous entrepreneurs in both the public and private sectors. Second, the paper examines how and why this infrastructure for entrepreneurship emerges. I argue that while this infrastructure facilitates and constrains individual entrepreneurs, it is the latter who construct and change the industrial infrastructure. This infrastructure does not emerge and change all at once by the actions of one or even a few key entrepreneurs. Instead, it emerges through the accretion of numerous institutional, resource, and proprietary events that co-produce each other over an extended period. Moreover, the very institutional arrangements and resource endowments created to facilitate industry emergence can become inertial forces that hinder subsequent technological development and adaptation by proprietary firms. This generative process has a dynamic history that is itself important to study systematically if one is to understand how novel forms of technologies, organizations, and institutions emerge. Finally, the paper emphasizes that the process of entrepreneurship is not limited to the for-profit sector; numerous entrepreneurial actors in the public and not-for-profit sectors play crucial roles. It motivates one to examine the different roles played by these actors, and how their joint contributions interact to develop and commercialize a new technology. This in turn makes it possible to understand how the risk, time, and cost to an individual entrepreneur are significantly influenced by developments in the overall Infrastructure for entrepreneurship. It also explains why the entrepreneurs who run in packs will be more successful than those that go it alone to develop their innovations.