Law, Innovation and Finance: A Review

A number of recent national and EU initiatives have sought explicitly to encourage innovative firms and venture capital finance. In keeping with the policy debate, this paper focuses explicitly on the role of law and lawyers in facilitating venture capital: that is, both supply by investors, and demand by entrepreneurs. It reviews existing literature in a way that seeks to clarify the links between law and legal institutions and the facilitation of venture capital finance, identifies open research questions and suggests a number of hypotheses. As such, it forms the first part of a wider study which will seek to test these hypotheses