Review of Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment

The forthcoming Autumn 2013 issue of Policy, published by the Centre for Independent Studies, features a nice review of my Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment (with Nicolai Foss).

Foss and Klein . . . focus on what the entrepreneur brings to economic production and the skills that must be exercised in creating a profit-making enterprise — the firm or organisation. Their contribution, and it is a major and well-argued one, is full of historical and theoretical detail that drives their theme of the entrepreneur as not just an “ideas” man or woman, but one who creates, when successful, an organisation that finds and orders the capital and processes appropriate to the tasks of producing goods and services at a profit.

Reviewer Barry Maley says the book explains “the essential intertwining of entrepreneurship with the firm” and offers, for the general reader, “an accessible insight into a subject central to economic production,” and is “relatively light on jargon and technicalities.”

Clusters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

That’s the title of a new review paper by Aaron Chatterji, Ed Glaeser, and William Kerr (a gated NBER working paper, unfortunately). Agglomeration has been a huge issue in the entrepreneurship, technology strategy, innovation policy, and economic growth literatures and it’s nice to have an up-to-date, not-very-technical review paper. (Hopefully there is an ungated copy out there somewhere.)

Clusters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Aaron Chatterji, Edward L. Glaeser, William R. Kerr
NBER Working Paper No. 19013, May 2013

This paper reviews recent academic work on the spatial concentration of entrepreneurship and innovation in the United States. We discuss rationales for the agglomeration of these activities and the economic consequences of clusters. We identify and discuss policies that are being pursued in the United States to encourage local entrepreneurship and innovation. While arguments exist for and against policy support of entrepreneurial clusters, our understanding of what works and how it works is quite limited. The best path forward involves extensive experimentation and careful evaluation.

[Cross-posted at Organizations and Markets]