🚀 Entrepreneurship

Blockchain-based token offerings, DeFi lending, and AI-enhanced crowdfunding are challenging traditional startup financing. Three studies examine whether decentralized capital formation can democratize funding access while maintaining screening quality.

The gig economy is producing a new path to entrepreneurship — workers using platform skills and networks as launching pads for independent ventures. Three studies examine how platforms enable and constrain this transition, and why social protections may promote rather than inhibit entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Generative AI is embedding itself in every stage of venture creation — from ideation to due diligence. Three recent studies reveal how LLMs reshape the entrepreneurial process, with implications for founder demographics, investment decisions, and venture quality.

Founding team composition is one of the strongest predictors of startup success, yet one of the least systematic. Three studies explore genetic algorithms, GenAI matching, and multi-agent simulation as tools for optimizing team assembly — and their inherent limits.

Deep tech ventures need more than standard startup support — they need patient capital, research infrastructure, and institutional configurations that most universities have not yet developed. Three studies examine how Triple Helix dynamics, ecosystem design, and twin transition mandates shape university-based deep tech entrepreneurship.

VC firms are using ML to screen deals and evaluate startups. But algorithmic systems trained on historical data may perpetuate the biases of historical investing — systematically missing the nonconforming founders who often produce the highest returns.

Entrepreneurial optimism enables venture creation but can prevent learning from failure. Research on overprecision, signal filtering, and pivot processes reveals how the same trait that starts businesses can also destroy them.

The more successful a social enterprise becomes, the more likely it is to drift from its social mission. New research distinguishes 'practice drift' from mission drift and identifies governance mechanisms that can maintain purpose under commercial pressure.

A founder's strategic response to crisis depends on whether their identity is bound to a specific venture or to the entrepreneurial process itself. Research reveals how identity dynamics predict pivot success, crisis resilience, and the ability to let go.

Over 120 million people are forcibly displaced. Many become entrepreneurs despite lacking legal status, networks, and capital. Research on refugee venture creation reveals the irreducible core of entrepreneurship — and why standard support programs often fail.