When Entrepreneurs Meet: The Collective Governance of New Ideas challenges our understanding of how entrepreneurs crystallize opportunities surrounding new technologies. While innovation is the fundamental driver of growth and prosperity, how the earliest stages of entrepreneurship are governed remains elusive. This book creates a new, institutional approach to understanding entrepreneurship before emphasizing how entrepreneurs create governance structures to coordinate new knowledge resources.
Rather than the conventional view that entrepreneurship happens inside firms, this unique transaction-cost economics analysis of entrepreneurship suggests it might begin earlier in hybrid, polycentric self-governance structures, including the innovation commons. Allen explores and analyses various examples of these structures, including hackerspaces and the institutions coalescing around the development of the blockchain economy, along with the dynamics of how those institutions might collapse into firms. This new understanding of the entrepreneurial governance problem is also connected to contemporary questions about the purpose, scope, and application of innovation policy.