The effects of appropriability on invention have been well studied, at least since Arrow (1962), but there has been little analysis of the effect of approbriability on the commercialization of existing inventions. Exploiting a database of 966 attempts by private firms to commercialize inventions...

In this paper, we establish a series of starting points for understanding the emergence of the industries associated with the commercial internet. First, we report baseline estimates of the number of internet technology companies created from 1994-2001. Approximately 50,000 companies solicited...

Francis Bacon, pioneer of the scientific method, noted in one of his aphorisms that “human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.” In this paper, we evaluate the extent to which this tendency encourages...

We explore a well-known instance of fast decision making under high uncertainty, venture capital (VC) opportunity screening. We analyze a sample of 722 funding requests submitted to an American VC firm and evaluate the influence of the form of the submission and content of business planning...