The realm of entrepreneurship: the local perspective

International workshop
13 March 2017
14 March 2017
March 13 - 14, 2017

The increasing worldwide integration of economies since the 1990s and the international crisis that is looming around since 2008 have made international coordination and the national implementation of macroeconomic policies increasingly difficult.

Macroeconomic policies progressively concentrated on the short-run, in particular on financial stabilization, to the disregard of longer term objectives. Growth and structural change suffered as a consequence, particularly in vulnerable countries.

All this deeply changed competitiveness, the origin of growth, and the nature and role of policies, since the possibility for countries to improve their relative performance was mainly found at the microeconomic level of markets and firms and at mesoeconomic level in the context of local development processes.

Economic growth and social development critically came to depend on the ability to mobilize and coordinate diffused and dispersed resources and capabilities, to innovate better and faster than the competitors, and to develop and have access to adequate intellectual property right protection.

This points to the central importance of both entrepreneurship, the driving resource for innovation, and of local development. Yet the critical importance of knowledge and learning makes entrepreneurship alone insufficient to drive change and competitiveness.

While the awareness of the central role of institutions in the determination of the successful performance of countries and regions is well established, other fundamental components of the successful tool kit, such as governments and universities, but also the non-profit sector and infrastructures, are less well established, yet no less important.

The workshop focuses on the nature and role of entrepreneurship in modern developed and emerging economies, and its relation to governments and universities, contemplating also related contexts and functions, such as the non-profit sector, intellectual property rights protection and infrastructures. It aims at explaining growth performance of economies and resilience or vulnerability to crisis.

The accent is particularly on innovation processes and patterns at local level and in small and medium sized enterprises.

In comparing entrepreneurship and its interplay with governance and the generation of knowledge in different contexts, the workshop intends to take a comparative perspective. Attention is concentrated particularly on three distinct international cases: a dominant emerging economy (China), a developed independent market economy (the United States) and integrated developed market economies – both resilient and vulnerable – within the Eurozone common currency area.

The contents of the workshop relate to three fundamental dimensions:

  1. Innovation and entrepreneurship, its forms and nature, with special reference to their role and evolution in the period of the crisis, to the comparison between contexts of cooperation and of competition, and to local development;
  2. Enterprises, governments and universities, in the former case the role of public authorities in innovation and intellectual property rights protection, and support given to entrepreneurship and enterprises; in the latter, the social function of academia and its freedom, versus economic value; the role of universities in innovation and their relations to enterprises;
  3. The effects of globalization and the crisis, with special focus on policies versus contexts in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship; on the nature, features and change of governments, enterprises and universities during the crisis and in different institutional settings in the US, China and both resilient and vulnerable areas and countries in the Eurozone.

The workshop is organized by DELoS (Development Economics and Local Systems) Ph.D. program, Doctoral School of Social Sciences, Department of Economics and Management and School in Social Sciences, University of Trento - Department of Economics and Business Sciences - University of Florence, in collaboration with: Department of City & Regional Planning and Center for Urban and Regional Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Economics and Centre for Research of Private Economy, Zhejiang University.

Contacts:
Doctoral School of Social Sciences
via Verdi 26, 38122 - Trento
ph. +39 0461 283756 - 2290
fax +39 0461 282335
school.socialsciences [at] unitn.it
Skype: school.socialsciences