Entrepreneurship and Innovation

I was invited to attend the Kauffman Foundation Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data in Kansas City, Missouri last week.

One purpose of the event was to expose researchers to new data sets. Being an outsider to this field, one of the most interesting things was to see how open everyone was with their data, methodology and findings. Almost every single presenter made a point to say that the data would be made available to the public.

I also learned that there is a basic lack of data in this field, which has led the Kauffman Foundation to fund a series of programs that will lead to a better understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation. One such program, the Kauffman Firm Survey, funded a panel of scholars to develop a longitudinal data set, to be made public this month on both the Kauffman site and the NORC data enclave. From what I saw of the data, it can be sliced in any number of ways to reveal insights into the world of business.

The Kauffman Foundation also funded the National Research Council to develop the report “Understanding Business Data: An Integrated Data System for America’s Future.”

From the back cover:

The U.S. Economy is highly dynamic: businesses open and close, workers switch jobs and start new enterprises, and innovative technologies redefine the workplace and enhance productivity. … This report presents strategies for improving accuracy, timeliness, coverage and integration of data that are used in constructing aggregate economic statistics, as well as in microlevel analyses of topics ranging from job creation and destruction and firm entry and exit to innovation and productivity. 

I appreciate being introduced to this issue by a group that is committed to evidence-backed understanding and change. A big “thank you” to EJ and others at the Kauffman Foundation for such a well attended and perfectly organized and coordinated meeting.