Anne Miner is giving the opening remarks at a conference entitled "Technology Entrepreneurship and Institutions: Contemporary and International Research," which is being held at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. A trip back home for me, and a nice reunion with Anne, Masado Ueda, Timo Goeschl, and others.

Anne's central point -- one that I heard her make often during my time in Madison -- is that  entrepreneurship scholarship of the sort she is interested in promoting is not like car repair. The point of entrepreneurship scholarship of this sort is not to produce a how-to manual, but to understand the forces that drive entrepreneurial behavior. Of course, causal theories are nice, and as we develop them, society will benefit. But we shouldn't expect to find a "secret sauce" that can turn any region into the next Silicon Valley. Indeed, Anne asserts that there is no secret sauce.

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Two economists at the Kauffman Foundation, Robert Litan and Tim Kane, have started Growthology, a new blog on entrepreneurship and economic growth.  Gotta love the name.  The Kauffman Foundation announcement is here.

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The NYT suggests that Ireland's recent entrepreneurial success is the "culmination of nearly four decades of government policies." Here's the formula:

The government rewrote its tax policies to attract foreign investment by American corporations, made all education free through the university level and changed tax rates and used direct equity investment to encourage Irish people to set up their own businesses.

In addition, there was the fact that Ireland is a member of the European Union. What, exactly, has the EU contributed?

One reason for many changes in Ireland is its membership in the European Union, which has brought new perspectives and regulations from its governing councils in Brussels.

New perspectives and regulations? "Perspectives" seems to refer to the fact that some Irish entrepreneurs are transcending Ireland's borders. Of course, that is not just a matter of perspective, but a matter of free movement of goods and services across EU member state borders.

The EU "regulations" referred to in the story aren't new rules designed to promote entrepreneurship, but rather new rules that, for example, aim to improve worker health and safety, thus creating business opportunities for compliance firms. One firm's burden, another firm's treasure.

Of course, all of the EU benefits inure to every member state, so what makes Ireland special? Is it really just a matter of reducing taxes, providing free higher education, and making direct government equity investments? This paper suggests a more complex answer for Ireland:

Regional transformation through technology-based entrepreneurship cannot be easily measured by solely by 'tangible' resource input factors such as access to seed capital or telecommunications infrastructure. Instead, it is important that policy makers need to recognize the importance of fostering a 'bottom-up' approach towards technology-based entrepreneurship especially the role of 'intangibles' such as role models, culture towards risk and failure, and leadership in stimulating technology based entrepreneurship in regions.

I am not trying to suggest that the academics are spot on about Ireland while the NYT reporters are hopeless simpletons. But I believe that finding the root causes of entrepreneurship is a difficult task. In the end, I tend to give more credit to the accounts that describe a stew with many ingredients than the linear cause-and-effect stories.

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Yesterday at the University of Wisconsin Law School, a group of legal scholars gathered to discuss "law and entrepreneurship." Anne Miner, my colleague in the UW Business School, launched the day with a discussion of "What is Entrepreneurship?" in which she mapped to progression of that field of study. Here I am with Anne after her session:

The morning was devoted to teaching law and entrepreneurship, and the afternoon was filled with paper presentations. In between, we took an impromptu hike along Lake Mendota:

Left to right: Vic Fleischer, Mike Guttentag, Usha Rodrigues, Bob Lawless, Gordon Smith, Darian Ibrahim, George Geis, Bobby Bartlett, and Brian Broughman.

At the end of afternoon session, Mike Guttentag provided the recap of what we had learned, though I am not sure you can get that from the whiteboard:

We finished the day on Capitol Square at The Old-Fashioned, which provided an authentic Wisconsin experience, including fried cheese curds. Dan Burk, who will be speaking at the companion conference entitled Technology Entrepreneurship & Institutions: Contemporary & International Research, met us for dinner.

A good time was had by all.

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This past summer, I posted some preliminary thoughts on "law and entrepreneurship" as a field of study. Since then I have been reading more of the entrepreneurship canon, and working with my finance colleague, Masako Ueda, on a project, the first product of which I will post on SSRN later this week. My views on "law and entrepreneurship" have evolved. Here are some paragraphs (sans footnotes) from a draft of my paper with Masako:

Joseph Schumpeter famously identified the “process of Creative Destruction” as the “essential fact about capitalism.” In Schumpeter’s view, the entrepreneur is the agent of creative destruction, and the distinguishing attribute of entrepreneurial activity is novelty. Entrepreneurs create new products, improve the manufacture of existing products with new methods, exploit new sources of supply, and develop new forms of organization.

According to Schumpeter, entrepreneurial activity “constitutes a distinct economic function” because its very novelty ensures that it transcends the present body of understanding and because society resists novelty, thus requiring of the entrepreneur the distinctive skill of “getting things done.” Schumpeter’s prediction that entrepreneurs would become obsolete seems passé in the wake of the revolutionary technological developments of the past few decades, but getting novel things done remains at the heart of modern conceptions of the entrepreneurial process.

Though entrepreneurship as a distinct field of research is still searching for an identity, entrepreneurship scholars gradually are forging a consensus about the core commitments of the field. In describing the entrepreneurial process, for example, scholars typically focus on “the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities.” Novelty is inherent in such opportunities, and “entrepreneurship is the mechanism by which society more fully appreciates its investment in the creation of new knowledge, such as research and education.”

...

We restrict our attention to “the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities” by new firms and exclude entrepreneurial activities by established firms from our definition of entrepreneurship. The latter is sometimes called “intrapreneurship." Scholary interests in intrapreneurship are clustered around the issue of how to circumvent organizational inertia in established firms and to get novel things done, as opposed to conducting routine business. Important issues in entrepreneurship by new firms arise from lack of experience and resources, which established firms usually possess. Given these significant differences between intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship by new firms, we gain little from mixing the two forms of entrepreneurship together.

Our conception of “law and entrepreneurship” follows naturally from the foregoing description of entrepreneurship and encompasses positive law (including constitutions, statutes, and regulations), common law doctrines, and private ordering that relate to “the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities by new firms.” While much entrepreneurship research focuses on the characteristics of entrepreneurs or on the performance of entrepreneurial firms, law and entrepreneurship studies should focus on the legal structure and regulation of entrepreneurial firms. Many entrepreneurship scholars emphasize the importance of organization to the study of entrepreneurship.

Of course, as always, comments are most welcome.

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We're off to the races here in Colorado ... classes start today.  For anyone who may be interested, I've put together a website with my course info, research pages and my research agenda, Deals and Venture Capital resources pages, and so on.  The site is still kinda buggy, but I'm working on it.  I'm new to using Dreamweaver and html (or web development of any kind beyond blogging), so any suggestions would be most welcomed. 

The home page is http://spot.colorado.edu/~fleischv/ or, if you prefer the more blatantly self-promoting URL, victorfleischer.com.

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The study of entrepreneurship in law schools is primitive. While legislatures, regulators, and courts sometimes tailor rules to small or emerging businesses, law typically is not organized according to whether the regulated actor is an entrepreneur. As a result, scholars who aspire to study "law and entrepreneurship" must confront the fundamental challenge of defining their field.

The word "entrepreneur" is derived from the French word entreprendre, which means "to undertake." An entrepreneur, therefore, connotes "one who undertakes." Implicit in this general description of an entrepreneur is the existence of an opportunity that the entrepreneur is attempting to exploit.

Opportunities sometimes are portrayed as gemstones: a valuable item that is to be discovered by the entrepreneur. Others portray opportunities as inventions: they are meant to be created. Under either characterization, however, the entrepreneur does not rest once the opportunity is identified. The process of exploiting the opportunity is the essence of entrepreneurship, and this process inevitably leads to the creation of organization:

At the most general level, entrepreneurship is the creation of value through the creation of organization. Entrepreneurs discover, invent, reveal, enact, and in other ways make manifest some new product, service, transaction, resource, technology, and/or market that has value to the community or marketplace…. [T]he process of creating value operates through the creation of a multiperson system (organization) that transforms input such as materials, money, and time into output such as product and services. Excluded are the activities of the solely self-interested (the clever thief and the con artist) and those who create without deliberate and choiceful organizing of human resources (e.g., artists, inventors, and solo-self-employed professionals). Included are those who start a business or nonprofit agency and those who transform (acquire, redirect, restructure, and "turn around") existing organizations so they add new values to the community or marketplace. (Barbara J. Bird, Entrepreneurial Behavior 3 1989).)

The domain of "law and entrepreneurship" follows naturally from this understanding of entrepreneurship. "Law and entrepreneurship" is, at root, the study of the legal structure of organizations. This study includes the contracts, statutes/regulations, and common law doctrines that apply to the formation, governance, and termination of organizations.

If you are still reading, you may be wondering why I feel impelled to organize the study of "law and entrepreneurship." The explanation is that our understanding of the legal structure of organizations is lumpy (e.g., we understand a lot about public corporations and venture capital relationships, but relatively little about strategic alliances) and incomplete (i.e., empirical studies of organizations tend to focus on a narrow range of questions). By searching for coherence across various types of organizations and asking a broader range of questions about those organizations, I believe that we can improve our understanding of the role of law in shaping organizations of all type. This is the motivation for my interest in empirical studies of relational contracts.

With that background, does the notion of "law and entrepreneurship" articulated above seem like a  sensible first step at defining the field? I realize that the definition is very broad, including, among other things, the entirety of "business organizations" law. But why not consider business organizations a sub-field of "law and entrepreneurship"? Under what theory are the formation, governance, and termination of partnerships, corporations, and other limited liability firms outside the scope of "law and entrepreneurship"? And if the study of those business forms were connected in more meaningful ways to other organizations, wouldn't that be a good thing?

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If you have fond memories of the late 1990s, check out the Business Plan Archive. Here is the description:

Welcome to the Business Plan Archive.  In partnership with the Library of Congress, the Center for History and New Media, and the University of Maryland Libraries, the Archive collects and preserves business plans and related planning documents from the Birth of the Dot Com Era so that future generations will be able to learn from this remarkable episode in the history of technology and entrepreneurship.

Registration is required, but this is a great resource for people who study entrepreneurship.

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Ann Althouse, sympathetically commenting on a NYT Magazine article on the "gifted child movement," suggests that we should "let kids be kids."  I disagree.

Relentlessly mainstreaming gifted kids has negative pedagogical and social effects.  Trusting that genius will inevitably triumph works in the movies.  But not in real life.  It's true that some exceptional geniuses have done well despite dismal classrooms and "wobbly" family situations.  But the more common story is that talent and inspiration, if it's not cultivated, wastes away. 

The truth is that smart kids often learn differently from those in the mainstream.  Class can be boring and tedious.  Gifted kids are predisposed to develop procrastination habits; a surprising number underperform academically.  Worse yet, when kids display intelligence in mainstream classrooms, they're often ridiculed.  Teachers may feel threatened.  Classmates can be cruel.  Social pressure to downplay intelligence is strong.  If we care about cultivating genius -- as I think we should -- then why pretend it isn't there?

Compare the resources we offer gifted kids with the attention we lavish on athletes, or the resources we offer (or at least are legally required to offer) to those at the bottom of the bell curve.  If your child is learning disabled, or mentally retarded, or has a behavior disorder, then your school has a legal obligation to develop an individualized education plan tailored to your child's needs.  If you're gifted, the school has no special obligation at all.  In most school districts, I suspect we spend more resources at the bottom of the bell curve than at the top. 

Let kids be kids, maybe, but in the right environment.  I'm a member of SET/SMPY and an alum of CTY, aka "nerd camp."  I also spent four years working at CTY as a TA and residence advisor.  The surprising magic of CTY isn't in the classroom; it's in the social environment.  Accelerating learning and freeing kids from rigid lesson plans is only part of the point.  CTY provides a place where intelligence can thrive, where kids can be smart, eccentric, and curious about the world.  They can learn the social skills that they will need in academia or the lab or the law firm.  CTY teachers learn how to stay out of the way, guiding the students as needed but largely letting the kids teach themselves and each other.  Put kids in an environment where intelligence is ridiculed, and talent will be wasted.  Cultivate it with good textbooks, gentle oversight, and lots of cool puzzles to solve, and good things will happen, as the research shows. 

I recently heard that there's dozens of CTY alums working at Google.  I don't think it's a coincidence.

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In my world, INSITE stands for Initiative for Studies In Technology Entrepreneurship. This is the title for the technology entrepreneurship cluster here at the University of Wisconsin. They pay my salary, so I love them.

Jed Woodworth just emailed me with some disconcerting news. INSITE is also the acronym used by the International Network of Somewhere in Time Enthusiasts. They claim to have started in 1997, but this is the first I have heard of them. I suspect that they are playing some time travel game in hopes of getting common law trademark rights.

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Forbes has ranked the most entrepreneurial campuses in the U.S. The methodology emphasizes "whether the school offers a major or concentration in entrepreneurial studies; whether the school operates programs like a small business incubator or venture capital fund to help students launch their own businesses; and whether the school offers opportunities for students to learn about entrepreneurship through internships or cooperative study."

And the winner is ... The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

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Almost immediately after returning from Scout Camp, I took off for the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in New Orleans. New Orleans in August? Well, with over 7,000 attendees, they needed a convention city, and it's hard to top New Orleans for hotel space. Regulars at this meeting call it "The Academy." This sounds a bit presumptuous to us outsiders, but as long as we understand each other, I suppose it's all right.

One thing became clear to me immediately: people do not attend the Academy to learn from the sessions; they attend the Academy to network. (This is not unlike the annual meeting of law professors at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting, which is held each January. Coincidentally, New Orleans will host the meeting next year.)

Most sessions had barely more people in the audience than presenting. And after attending a few sessions, I could understand why: the presentations were clipped, ill-designed if the purpose was to engage in meaningful scholarly exchange. Most presentations were limited to three or four PowerPoint slides. Enough to spark an interest, but not enough for real learning.

Alongside the meeting, Ph.D candidates were interviewing for jobs. The candidates were usually easy to spot: they were wearing suits and that anxious smile like a high school kid at his first dance. Many of the candidates has 10, 15, 20, or more interviews, so it looked like an extended torture. I am happy to be on this side of the desk.

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My colleague Anuj Desai drew my attention to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It describes some of the initiatives of universities that recently received grants from the Kauffman Foundation to take entrepreneurship out of the business school. (We were in the running for one of the grants, though we were ultimately not selected.) The most interesting part of the article to me was the description of dissenters to the program.

For example, Stewart A. Weaver, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, had this to say:

However broadly one attempts to define it, the term 'entrepreneurship' has unavoidably commercial implications that are unsuited to an undergraduate college of arts and sciences. The focus on entrepreneurship detracts from teaching about lasting values like wisdom and humanity that don't have any commercial value.

While the principal goal of the Kauffman program is to expand the notion of entrepreneurship beyond the commercial realm, I am a skeptic of so-called social entrepreneurship programs. The source of my skepticism is simply that I am not sure that "social entrepreneurship" has any distinctive content. Frankly, nothing I have heard from people who talk about social entrepreneurship has convinced me that "social entrepreneurship" is anything other than "entrepreneurship."

And this seems to be at the heart of Professor Weaver's objections. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about successful competition, how to get ahead. The tension between capitalism and community has been discussed on this blog before, and I cannot claim that Professor Weaver is completely off track. On the other hand, I do claim that he misses an important purpose of entrepreneurships studies:

To make his point, Mr. Weaver and his wife, Celia S. Applegate, an associate professor of history, approached the university's curriculum committee with a spoof proposal for a course: "Great Entrepreneurs of the 20th Century: Gandhi and Hitler." Rather than take a traditional historical look at the two men, the two professors said, "we will take a commercial approach that recognizes the shared entrepreneurial talents that each might well have admired in the other." In Hitler's case, that talent might be "how an ambitious but not-very-talented painter took the idea of racial supremacy and turned it into a workable method of plunder, murder, and genocide." The point, Mr. Weaver says, was to show the "moral slippage that can ensue when you start applying market metaphors indiscriminately to history."

Obviously, the purpose of studying entrepreneurship is not to "apply market metaphors indiscriminately to history," but to better understand the role of entrepreneurs in society. My problem with Professor Weaver and others who share his position, is not that they are wrong about the commercial nature of entrepreneurship, but that they somehow have come to believe that the study of commerce is inherently inferior to the study of other facets of human behavior and interaction. Courses in entrepreneurship are not necessarily courses in "how to start and run a successful business." (Strange that Weaver doesn't see this, given his interest in industrial history.)

Weaver's objections appear to be a form of intellectual parochialism aimed at preserving his particular view of "higher education." The root problem with his educational program is that -- contrary to his elevated claims about wisdom and humanity -- it produces students who are incapable of understanding the world in which they live. In Professor Weaver's ideal university, vast tracts of human interaction are off limits, and that is shameful.

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The United States is much derided around the world today, but in the area of entrepreneurship we are still the model. The European Union's recent report on "Helping to create an entrepreneurial culture" testifies of that fact:

The image of entrepreneurs as positive role models has never been as strong in Europe as in the US. Becoming an entrepreneur has long been seen as an unsafe and risky option, not particularly appealing and less socially rewarding than other, more traditional professions. The educational systems have not in the past been geared towards the development of entrepreneurship and self-employment, the final goal of the educational path being rather to produce employees working in a big company or in public administration.

This is a fascinating document, which raises important questions about the creation of entrepreneurial culture.

I am headed for Europe next week, and among the stops is the Babson-Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research Conference, being held this year in Glasgow. Among other things, I expect to see a lot of European academics who study entrepreneurship in countries that are not very entrepreneurial. A few years ago, a friend from Finland commented that Finns study entrepreneurship to death, but ultimately do nothing. To me the problem seems more complex: what exactly is to be done?

The premise of the EU report is that most entrepreneurs are made, not born, and the purpose of the report is to encourage efforts toward developing education in entrepreneurship. This includes "promoting the development of personal qualities that are relevant to entrepreneurship, such as creativity, spirit of initiative, risk-taking and responsibility; raising students� awareness of self-employment as a career option ...; and providing the business skills that are needed in order to start a new venture." Will this work in any meaningful sense? Well, it isn't clear to me that public primary and secondary school teachers are effective entrepreneurship instructors, but I like the aspiration. One of the reasons I feel a sense of mission about entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurs in the mold contemplated by this report are independent and self-directed, not mere cogs in a great machine. Ultimately, entrepreneurship is about leading a better life, not just making money.

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Synergy Fest pointed me to a press release on the Stanford Business School's website entitled "Failure is the Key to Understanding Success." This summarizes work by Jerker Denrell, who purports to have discovered a deep secret of organizations research: don't forget to study failure if you want to understand success.

This is an area of striking contrast between law professors and business professors. While business professors fret about sampling biases in favor of successful events, law professors almost uniformly study failures. The bread and butter of our teaching and research remains the judicial opinion, and most judicial opinions (at least in my areas of law) are the end result of badly fractured relationships. It's no wonder lawyers tend to be a cynical lot.

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Now removed by several years from the internet bubble, we should begin to have some profound thoughts about that experience. Fast Company asked several luminaries for their views:

* Sue Bostrom (Cisco Sr. VP): "Internet productivity is real."
* Robert Shiller (Yale): "It's just hard to understand what's coming up."
* Jeffrey Dachis (former Razorfish CEO): "The 1990s were about greed, lying, and stupidity."
* Bob Paul (Covisint CEO): "Unless you have laserlike focus on the problem you're trying to solve, technology is irrelevant."
* Ann Winblad (founder Hummer Winblad Venture Partners): "optimism cannot outweigh execution."

These snippets are not entirely fair, as each of the respondents had more to say, but I find it intriguing that we could still be so ambivalent about the lessons from the 1990s. We recognize that the world is not the same as it was before -- that it is, indeed, dramatically different because of the internet. Nevertheless, we also recognize that change is not inherently good and that many people can be harmed by the process. In short the triumphalism of the 1990s is largely gone. Robert Shiller expresses the angst that many of us feel:

I'm sure there will be more Bill Gateses -- really rich people who are not rich today. But I don't know if that is going to affect the whole economy favorably. I worry about millions of people being left behind and falling in their standard of living. I think that widening gap may be the most important issue of this time.

Me, too.

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Is there a separate field of entrepreneurship studies? That was part of our conversation on Friday in the INSITE Research Frontiers. This issue is important in business schools, which have devoted substantial resources to entrepreneurship studies over the past few decades. The question is whether there is any there there. That is, can we find any reason to treat the study of entrepreneurship separately from other fields of study.

Strategy scholars successfully made the case for their discipline in the 1970s. Organizational behavior scholars made the case for their field before that. In the end, the answer depends on whether there is anything distinctive about entrepreneurship. We know, for example, that organizations behave differently than individuals; therefore, it makes sense to separate the study of organizational behavior from the study of individual behavior. But are entrepreneurs different from other people like organizations are different from individuals? Even if you intuitively believe that entrepreneurs are different, proving it is another matter. So far, studies of entrepreneurs' interests, behaviors, and personalities are all over the map. Those who want recognition for this field still need to make the case.

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Barry, you emphasize the irrationality of starting a business. In a prior post, Jeff Cornwall and I have a short exchange about entrepreneurial irrationality. He claims that entrepreneurs are "rarely gamblers," to which I respond, "successful entrepreneurs rarely view themselves as gamblers." My point was that entrepreneurs are so confident in themselves and/or their idea that they do not think of their venture as a gamble, regardless of what their friends and family say. In his rejoinder, Jeff observes: "I am amazed at the number of entrepreneurs who really are prudent in decision making." He suggests that entrepreneurs might be both confident and careful. Three questions about this:

(1) Do you favor one side over the other in this debate -- remember, you are at my blog now! -- or do you have a different view?

(2) If you are crazy, do you know it? You have written a book packed with sensible advice, but I get the feeling that much of what you say is tainted by hindsight bias. In other words, you can see the lessons now, but you learned the lessons by doing, both making mistakes and creating successes. If that is true, will budding entrepreneurs really be able to internalize your advice, or will they understand it only after going crazy for awhile?

(3) That last question is a nice segue to this idea: I am interested in hearing about the prospect of "creating" the entrepreneurial mind through education. This is a variation on that old question, are entrepreneurs born, not made? In your view, what is the role of entrepreneurship education in spurring entrepreneurship? (Note that Barry believes that entrepreneurs are "genetically optimistic," but "even with the proper genetic makeup, you won't be an entrepreneur unless you take the leap and seek your edge.")

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My absence yesterday and light posting generally recently can be attributed to a last-second push to prepare a grant application for the Kauffman Foundation. We are competing in this program for some dollars to take entrepreneurship education campus-wide.

I spent last night and this morning in Kansas City as part of the Wisconsin team that was pitching our plan to the Kauffman judges. I have no idea whether we will get the money, but we learned a lot about ourselves and about entrepreneurship during the past few months. Moreover, we now have a plan for building on the success of INSITE. I just wanted to say that I am impressed with the zeal of the Kauffman Foundation in promoting entrepreneurship. For those of you who are on the outside looking in, entrepreneurship people may seem like a strange subculture, but animating their actions is a deep conviction that entrepreneurship can change the world for the better. I enjoy being part of something like that.

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Over the past few months, I have been thinking fairly intensely about entrepreneurship education. As you undoubtedly know, entrepreneurship studies are of relatively recent vintage, and they tend to be confined to business schools and economics and engineering departments. It's a shame.

Law should be a much bigger part of the mix because it plays a central role in shaping most entrepreneurial activity. I suspect a great deal of the blame for this omission should be placed on lawyers. To date we have not used "entrepreneurship" as one of the myriad categories to organize our study of law. As a result, when entrepreneurship scholars think about law in connection with entrepreneurship, they usually think about patents or trademarks, but this is too narrow a coneption of the role of law.

We lawyers have a lot to offer to entrepreneurship scholars, most of whom (in my experience) are woefully ignorant of the legal structures -- not just partnerships, corporations, LLCs, etc., but also the contractual relationships -- that shape much entrepreneurial activity. I plan to do something about this, but I cannot disclose it here. Not yet. I hope to have something more substantial to say on this subject by the end of next summer.

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