Entrepreneurship & Innovation

This is the first study to consider the relationship between open source software (OSS) and entrepreneurship around the globe. This study measures whether country-level participation on the GitHub OSS platform affects the founding of innovative ventures, and where it does so, for what types of ventures. We estimate these effects using cross-country variation in new venture founding and OSS participation. We propose an approach using instrumental variables, and cannot reject a causal interpretation.

This case tells the story of Microsoft’s 2018 acquisition of GitHub and the subsequent launch of GitHub Copilot, a tool that uses generative artificial intelligence to suggest snippets of code to software developers in real time. Set in late 2021, when Copilot was still in beta, the case asks how Microsoft and GitHub should roll out Copilot to the public.

Can accelerators pick the most promising startup ideas no matter their provenance? Using unique data from a global accelerator where judges are randomly assigned to evaluate startups headquartered across the globe, we show that judges are less likely to recommend startups headquartered outside their home region by 4 percentage points. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest this discount leads judges to pass over 1 in 20 promising startups.

Technology startups play an essential role in the economy—with seven of the ten largest companies rooted in technology, and venture capital investments totaling approximately $300B annually. Yet, important startup outcomes (e.g., whether a startup raises venture capital or gets acquired) remain difficult to forecast—particularly during the early stages of venture formation. Here, we examine the impact of an essential, yet underexplored, factor that can be observed from the moment of startup creation: founder personality.

In Think Bigger: How to Innovate, Sheena Iyengar―an acclaimed author and expert in the science of choice―answers a timeless question with enormous implications for problems of all kinds across the world: “How can I get my best ideas?”

Building infrastructure is hard; building a trillion dollars’ worth of infrastructure within a decade, while jump-starting U.S. manufacturing and protecting fragile ecosystems, is harder still. But if President Biden’s climate finance windfall is to position the United States to lead on clean-energy jobs, trade and innovation, that building needs to start now.

Speeding up the adoption of already proven and scalable technologies, and exposing the many hidden costs associated with fossil fuels, is a necessary goal. Achieving it will require new policies to guide investments in the right direction, and techno-optimists ought to be the loudest advocates.

Economic frictions pervade the founding, financing, growing, and exiting of high-growth entrepreneurial firms. This chapter considers one friction that currently affects a small, but important, set of entrepreneurs: racial and gender discrimination. I first collect facts from a large empirical literature that show clear gender and race gaps in participation and financing of startups. Female founders manage 16-25% of all startups, while Black entrepreneurs rarely exceed 3% of the startup population.