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My research seeks to understand the mechanisms by which the cutting-edge of the capitalist political economic system evolves. A particular interest is the way entrepreneurs develop and commercialize new technologies that build new industries and reorganize existing ones. While some of these technologies have only localized impacts, the most powerful of these can lead to the emergence of new institutions, ways of organizing work, and spatial dimensions of capitalism as a system. I have explored all of these dimensions in my research.

After pre-dissertational research on the impacts of the electric motor on U.S. manufacturing, both inside the factory and on the location of these factories. My Ph.D. dissertation published as Biotechnology: The University-Industry Complex (Yale 1986) examined how the new biotechnological knowledge developed in research universities was commercialized by small research-driven university spin-offs funded by venture capitalists. My study of the biotechnology industry resulted in my continuing studies of four inter-related topics:

First, the role of the research university as a source of potentially commercializeable knowledge and the paths by which that knowledge becomes commercialized.

Second, the geography of innovation and entrepreneurship and, in particular, the cutting-edge technological information and communication technology-based clusters such as Silicon Valley.

Third, the history of how capital is allocated finance innovation and, in particular, the role and development of venture capital and stock markets in the current US national innovation system.

Finally, more recently, I have become interested in the impact of China on the configuration of global capitalism.

While much of research is at the micro-level and phenomenon-based, it is informed by the implications of these topics for the evolution of the capitalism as social and economic system.

 


Books 

 

          

 

              

 


Research Universities


Algorithms and Platforms


High-Technology Regions and Entrepreneurship


Venture Capital and the US National Innovation System


Impact of Asia on Global Capitalism


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