How Can Law Foster Innovative Entrepreneurship? A Blueprint for a Research Program

From Urs Gasser, Berkman Fellow and Director of the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen...

I just got back from a conference on “Legal Institutions and Entrepreneurship” at Stanford, organized by the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Science and the Kauffman Foundation. Experts from various disciplines, including biology, neuro-economics, zoology, and business studies, among others, discussed the question how innovative entrepreneurship (in the Schumpeterian sense) can be facilitated by legal institutions and alternative institutional arrangements like, for instance, reputation systems.

In my contribution, I presented the idea of a “legal lab” analogous, for instance, to the MIT’s media lab, which would be devoted to the study of innovations within the legal/regulatory system itself and would experiment with innovative institutional regimes (e.g. using virtual worlds such as Second Life as rich social environments). Together with my St. Gallen collaborator Herbert Burkert and with my colleagues and friends at the Berkman Center, John Palfrey and Colin Maclay, I’ve been working on this idea for some months, and I’m thrilled that several conference participants – including Judith Donath and Oliver Goodenough – will help us to work towards a project proposal in the weeks to come.

In my formal presentation, I attempted to frame the main research topics at the heart of the law & entrepreneurship debate by offering an initial mental map, consisting of three related, but analytically distinct clusters of research.

1. The first cluster deals with a set of rather fundamental questions concerning the basic relationship between the legal system and entrepreneurship...

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