Technology Commercialization, Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth

• Productive Entrepreneurship and Disruption of the Economy
  RR&S Associates have contributed significantly to understand role entrepreneurship plays in economic growth through publication of more than 20 books and hundreds of journal articles on the topic. This work, for example, demonstrated that entrepreneurship adds about 12 percent to national productivity and GDP in the U.S. A large proportion of new jobs in the U.S. are created by small businesses with relatively few technology-intensive high-growth firms contributing disproportionally. While much of entrepreneurship moves the economy toward the growth frontier, disruptive high-growth technology-centered companies such as Dell Technologies, Apple, Micro Soft, SpaceX, Tesla, Facebook and Instagram move the frontier. Anunderstanding of this distinction and the differences in entrepreneurship effects is important for educated policy design. RR&S Associates are involved on many fronts in the building and application of knowledge on entrepreneurial processes within economies, particularly as they relate to providing entrepreneurship-driven economic development policy and programmatic assistance. 
  
• Evaluating Regional Entrepreneurship Policy and Performance with Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Models
  Researchers and economic development practitioners increasingly recognize that the success of national and regional entrepreneurship depends on a multitude of factors, which are collectively called entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). The ability to define and to measure EEs is a challenging task but is crucial for informed policy design. RR&S Associates were involved in the development of major measurement approaches such as the Global Entrepreneurship Development Index (GEDI) and the Regional Entrepreneurship Development Index (REDI), which are widely used in research and practice. Using REDI, RR&S Associates analyzed strengths and weaknesses of regional ecosystems in the Autonomic Regions of Spain, the NUTS 2 regions of the European Union and in various metropolitan regions including London, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Shanghai. These analyses formed the basis for recommendations to local leadership identifying the areas in need of support in order to enhance entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. 
  
• An Integrated Multi-Disciplinary Entrepreneurship Model Program
  In the late 1990s, universities began to understand the importance of entrepreneurship in economic and business growth. The number of educational entrepreneurship programs in the U.S. grew from about 20 in the early 1990s to over 200 today. RR&S Associates were actively involved in this change via design and implementation of education and support programs for aspiring entrepreneurs. As one example, in early 2000s, RR&S Associates designed a university-wide interdisciplinary entrepreneurship program that spanned several departments including engineering, business, sociology, public policy, arts (digital art and gaming) and health. An interlinked curriculum across departments was developed that integrated existing courses with selected new ones to offer a coherent and multi-faceted program to create fertile ground for novel business ideas and to prepare successful entrepreneurs, as well as entrepreneurial scholars.