International Mobility of Engineers and the Rise of Entrepreneurship in the Periphery

entrepreneurship, knowledge economy, start-ups, information technology, venture capital, China, India, USA

International mobility of engineers and the rise of entrepreneurship in the periphery

By 2000, over one-third of Silicon Valley’s high-skilled workers were foreign-born, and overwhelmingly from Asia. These US-educated engineers are transforming developmental opportunities for formerly peripheral regions as they build professional and business connections to their home countries. In a process more akin to ‘brain circulation’ than ‘brain drain’, these engineers and entrepreneurs, aided by the lowered transaction costs associated with digitization, are transferring technical and institutional know-how between distant regional economies faster and more flexibly than most large corporations. This paper examines how Chinese- and Indian-born engineers are contributing to highly localized processes of entrepreneurial experimentation in their home countries, while maintain close ties to the technology and markets in Silicon Valley. – entrepreneurship ; knowledge economy ; start-ups ; information technology ; venture capital ; China ; India ; US

Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part II

Analyzes the educational backgrounds and career trajectories of immigrant entrepreneurs, finding that advanced education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is correlated with high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation

Losing the World's Best and Brightest

Presents findings from a survey of Indian, Chinese, and European students at U.S. colleges and universities on their decisions to stay or return home after graduation and the factors behind the decisions, such as where they see the best opportunities

The Grass Is Indeed Greener in India and China for Returnee Entrepreneurs

Presents survey findings on why Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs left the United States to found companies back home, how they view their home countries' business climates and their advantages and disadvantages, and whether they maintain ties to the U.S

America's Loss Is the World's Gain: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part IV

Analyzes survey data on highly educated Indian and Chinese workers and students who returned home from the United States -- their characteristics, motivations for coming to and leaving the U.S., professional success, and odds of returning to the U.S

The L&E of Intellectual Property – Do we get maximum innovation with the current regime?

Innovation is crucial to economic growth – the essential path for lifting much of the world population out of dire poverty and for maintaining the living standard of those who already have. To stimulate innovation, the legal system has to support the means through which innovators seek to get rewarded for their efforts. Amongst these means, some, such as the first mover advantage or 'lead time,' are not directly legal; but secrets and intellectual property rights are legal institutions supported for the specific purpose of stimulating innovation. Whilst the protection of secrets has not changed very much over recent years, intellectual property (or IP) has. IP borrows some features from ordinary property rights, but is also distinct, in that, unlike physical goods, information, the object of IP, is not inherently scarce; indeed as information and communication technologies expand, the creation and distribution of information is becoming ever cheaper and in many circumstances abundant, so that selection is of the essence ('on the internet, point of view is everything'). Where rights on information extend too far, their monopolising effect may hamper innovation. The paper investigates the underlying structure of IP rights and surveys what we know empirically about the incentive effects of IP as about industries that flourish without formal IP

Social capital: a roadmap of theoretical and empirical contributions and limitations

The general idea of social capital is that relationships matter. In this sense, the trust, cooperation and reciprocity involved in these relationships can have a positive impact on the wealth of society by reducing transaction costs, facilitating collective actions, and lowering opportunistic behavior. This work sheds light on the different theoretical and empirical problems that a scholar is likely to face in dealing with social capital research and analysis. We propose a critical roadmap of the social capital theories and applications for a general audience, nonusers included, with particular attention to the works of political and social economists. We provide a critical debate on the different definitions and measures produced, the theoretical frameworks developed, and the empirical techniques adopted so far in the analysis of the impact of social capital on socio-economic outcomes. We turn to the limitations of these techniques and suggest some basic strategies to reduce the magnitude of these limitations