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This chapter discusses the experience of Israel. At the time of its independence in 1948, its people came from different parts of the world, providing them with international orientation from the beginning. As a result, many of the businesses targeted foreign markets, mainly USA and Europe, and were more concerned with the intellectual property regime in these foreign countries than Israel's own. Together with public support for innovation and military‐related expenditure, some startup firms, mainly in information technologies, grew and succeeded in IPO (initial public offering) or selling themselves. Another successful case is Teva, now the largest generic drug producer. It benefited from the patent law amendment in 1967, which allowed local firms to copy patented drugs if the patent owners did not market them in Israel. This provision was dropped after TRIPS; however, Teva had accumulated process technologies by then.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the role of law and informal rules in the financial sector. Examines entrepreneurial finance in Japan, focusing on how the institutional environment associated with Japanese corporate governance in its post‐war heyday created problems for start‐up firms by handicapping the development of an active venture capital market. Bubbles notwithstanding, the maturation and dynamism of the venture capital market in the 1990s was one of the signal economic successes of the US in recent years. Not surprisingly, Japan has looked enviously at Silicon Valley. The search for an institutional structure supportive of entrepreneurial finance in Japan has motivated substantial corporate law reform over the past five years.

This chapter presents a case study on the establishment of management controls in an Internet start-up firm. In a span of a few years, the firm adopted a more structured form of management to demonstrate its management competence, and be more responsive to customers and potential partners. In short, the firm assumed a new guise not only to make itself profitable, but to capitalise its competencies to be realized in a merger. It was ‘for sale’ rather than only ‘for profit’.

Universities invest research resources primarily to increase faculty members’ scholarly productivity. Many funds must be spent within the fiduciary controls established by an external entity such as a federal agency, state legislature, or private donor. This chapter explores how universities invest their resources within the constraints of these restrictions. The simplest form of investment is to give research money directly to faculty members, usually via a regularly scheduled competition run through a faculty research committee. Procedures for appointing the committee members and conducting the competition are discussed in detail. The chief research officer typically reserves a pool of money to distribute non-competitively for items such as start-up funds for new faculty members, cost sharing for grant proposals, emergency funding for researchers who have lost a major grant (bridge support), travel support, and re-training. Funding mechanisms for each of these items are examined. Faculty members changing institutions may have active research grants that they want to take with them. Granting agency policies for transferring grants are reviewed.

The author argues that start-up firms, distressed firms, and near-bankrupt firms are the exception, not the rule, in the modern economy. This raises the question of whether such firms, which are commonly small and financed largely by the entrepreneurs involved, have value. The chapter also discusses the applicability of traditional valuation methods for such firms, compared with the novel value functional or recursive method. The author concludes that, when properly evaluated, start-ups and distressed firms do have value.

The male-dominated years of the gold rush made starting a business during the early 1850s relatively simple for women. Because of the great demand for their domestic skills and services, female proprietors enjoyed generous terms for financing new enterprises. However, these beneficial conditions were short lived. Financial disadvantages and lack of alternative employment options made San Francisco female proprietors cautious as to when to start their own businesses. This chapter discusses the cautious approach employed by women in starting their own businesses, analyzing their utilization or rejection of several start-up strategies and the reasons why some strategies were better than others.

Digital nomads have come to Bali to work. Chapter 4 unpacks nomads’ sources of earned income through entrepreneurship, freelancing, and full-time employment. It also details their occupations, which tend to cluster in marketing, e-commerce, coaching, and technology. It then explains the role of coworking spaces in the digital nomad ecosystem and the processes through which digital nomads build and sustain their work-centric community. Many of the more successful nomads continue to work side-by-side with those who are just starting out in this lifestyle. The informal social environment of coworking is supplemented by formal skill share events on topics like quitting one’s job, blogging, coding, podcasting, social media, outsourcing, team-building, partnering, getting investors, and finance that give nascent entrepreneurs opportunities to learn from the community. Bali is a place where people easily find cheerleaders, advisors, and helpers as they pursue their professional dreams.

This chapter offers guidelines for raising start-up funds and donations for a worker center. Fundraising or looking for donations requires a vision, a relationship, an “ask,” and meticulous follow-up. The individual may consider outlining both a five-year vision and a one-year vision in order to explain clearly the direction going and what is hoped to be built over the next five years, while also showing pragmatism around planning and building the worker center. Writing down the vision and first-year goals and objectives can help to articulate them to potential donors and demonstrate credibility. The chapter also discusses the importance of creating a start-up fundraising budget and outlines various approaches to budgeting, along with possible sources of funding support such as community foundations and partnership grants. Finally, it explains how to build relationships with donors, ask for start-up funds, and make follow-ups required to get a contribution.

Chapter Five explores how Taiwanese policymakers studied the Silicon Valley policy environment in the early 1980s, and then made significant adaptations when implementing their locally-focused, tax-credit centric interventionist VC policies. Most notably, Taiwanese policymakers, led by Minister-without-Portfolio K.T. Li, deployed tax credits geared at encouraging local, corporate VC investment rather than offering funding or regulatory changes that would promote a globally-linked VC market. Taiwan’s marquee VC policy tool (the tax credit) was pursued due to its policymakers’ preferences for using tax credits to promote local technology sector development. Taiwan’s use of a heterodox VC regulatory environment rather than Silicon Valley-like regulations stems from its policymakers’ prioritization of the local environment, particularly local investors’ preference for greater control over investment decisions and the local tax environment, over incentives to attract international fund managers.

This chapter offers a primer for starting and sustaining a youth-focused social entrepreneurship program. To this end, an overview of types of small businesses and social enterprises is included, along with conceptual resources for any venture. Terminology is introduced in this chapter to help the novice reader, including terms such as “cottage industry,” “micro-business,” “market analysis,” and “enterprise development phases.” Furthermore, this chapter explores the limits and potential of growth for youth social entrepreneurship initiatives. Whether or not and how to “scale up” is a foremost concern for nonprofit and for-profit social enterprises. The readers will find here a discussion of perspectives and considerations to help drive forward such an essential programmatic decision.

Organizations are crucial elements in innovation systems. Yet, their role is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to grasp and to examine all kinds of organization that are present in an innovation system. The purpose of this chapter is to define the conceptual basis of innovation policy in relation to the role of organizations, looking in particular at the roles of entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship as examples of organizational change. In so doing, this chapter aims at making three contributions. Firstly, it defines the roles of entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship in the innovation system, a crucial topic in understanding innovation dynamics and its blurring boundaries. Secondly, it identifies some common entrepreneurship- and intrapreneurship-related obstacles and barriers in the innovation system, and examines the policy instruments to solve or mitigate them. Thirdly, it discusses the limits of public policy and suggests key issues in the design of innovation policy.

Financing innovation processes is one of the crucial activities for developing commercially successful products and processes (innovations) and to facilitate their diffusion in the innovation system. This chapter addresses the rationales for public intervention, i.e. in which situations policy should be pursued in the field of financing. The chapter identifies a number of policy instruments for financing innovations that are available by the state, and which public agencies use for funding early-stage innovation. The chapter also describes the provision of risk capital by the Swedish state. This case describes a situation where unintended consequences of the policy pursued in Sweden led to the non-fulfilment of the additionality condition. We also describe how this mistake has begun to be resolved after discussions in the Swedish National Innovation Council. The chapter concludes with a number of important issues with regard to public financing of innovations.

This chapter discusses a government program that aims to provide access to finance for start-up firms, providing in-depth forensic analysis of government-sponsored public venture capital programs in Canada. It provides information on the different government programs to support venture capital and their outcomes, and compares them to private venture funds. The chapter identifies an interesting instrument that uses the exogenous variation in the political leadership of provincial governments. Funding by government-sponsored venture capitalists is related to having left-leaning provincial governments. The negative effect of government funding on various outcome measures becomes even stronger in the instrumental variable specifications. The data do not allow for a definitive welfare analysis; the effectiveness of these direct government interventions in the venture capital market is questionable.

Focusing on e-commerce and the Internet this chapter describes how Whitman used all seven rational methods in her scaling-up enhancement of eBay—the now iconic online-auction corporation. After describing eBay’s pre-Whitman era, the chapter examines her use of rational methods as a scaling-up CEO developing an early Internet, e-commerce start-up into a global corporation. Whitman emphasized learning and both quantitative and strategic calculation during this scaling up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The final section compares the short-term scaling-up opportunities of eBay with the longer-term opportunities offered to Amazon’s founding leader, Bezos, as he diversified Amazon from online bookseller into wide-ranging online retailer and developer of high-tech products and services. This last section argues that Whitman made the most of the comparatively short-term opportunity offered by eBayism, just as Bezos has made the most of the longer-term opportunity offered by Amazonism.

The idea of dedicated reinsurance companies was a new concept in the mid nineteenth century. Reinsurers were finding themselves exposed to larger than expected losses as the young industry struggled to create a position for itself in a market where insurers tended to offload mainly bad risks. Reinsurance started coming into its own only towards the end of the nineteenth century. By the time of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, reinsurance had established itself as a market force but it took a long time before it got organized via associations, meetings or a common publication platform. Reinsurers tended to adapt to the market via their client dealings, i.e. relying on the organizational forms of direct insurance. The post-Second-World-War period, however, brought about an entirely new set of risks. The magnitude and complexity of the new risks combined with negative technical results called for a new business model.

Networking and the giving and receiving of advice outside of one’s own firm are important features of entrepreneurship and innovation. We study how immigrants and natives utilize the potential networking opportunities provided by CIC, formerly known as the Cambridge Innovation Center. CIC is widely considered the center of the Boston entrepreneurial ecosystem. We surveyed 1,334 people working at CIC in three locations spread across the Boston area and CIC’s first expansion facility in St. Louis, MO. Survey responses show that immigrants value networking capabilities in CIC more than natives, and the networks developed by immigrants at CIC tend to be larger. Immigrants report substantially greater rates of giving and receiving advice than natives for six surveyed factors: business operations, venture financing, technology, suppliers, people to recruit, and customers. The structure and composition of CIC floors has only a modest influence on these immigrant versus native differences.

This chapter tells the story of Hewlett Packard’s process of becoming through the eyes of the founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who created a highly successful Test & Measurement Instrument company, invented the model of the Silicon Valley start-up, and set in motion an integral process of corporate becoming that made it possible for HP to transform itself six times over the seventy-seven years since its founding in the face of sweeping technological changes that felled most of its competitors over the years. The chapter discusses how the founders carried out the key tasks of strategic leadership and how they developed the four key elements of the company’s strategic leadership capability. By 2016, HP was in the throes of a seventh transformation to secure its continued survival by splitting in two independent companies: HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted within the Silicon Valley cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, Chapter 7 provides an account of the situated frictions among varying stakeholders in high-technology culture. The clashing of libertarian anarchy and entrepreneurial profit-seeking are forced into a vision reminiscent of the Californian Ideology, contributing to tensions of a splintering community. Blockchain technology is symptomatic of this polarising worldview. As “radical” and “disruptive” start-up companies are absorbed into the embedded spatial ties of the surrounding economy, they become increasingly “normalised” by their investors at the same time as scaling to enrol more users within their platforms. This has the effect of funnelling financial practices on blockchains through proprietary software controlled by a small number of technocrats, who can be more easily regulated by nation-state jurisdictions. The entrepreneurial geographies of high-technology agglomeration industries thereby act as another spatial limitation to algorithmic decentralisation.