Theory & Practice
Theory and Practice will be core to MITER’s mission of translating academic research on entrepreneurship into digestible and thoughtful content for our audience. Such articles could take the form of “Breaking the Myths with Data”.
Navigating Biotech Adolescence
Much changes when a biotech start-up becomes a mid-sized company. But how to maintain the creativity and spark of the early days to spur the next generation of drugs into the pipeline? In an interview with MITER, Merrimack’s Ulrik Nielsen discusses the challenge of sustaining innovation when a biotech start-up grows up.
Thoughts On Equity Splits
Equity split between founding partners has been recently described by Noam Wasserman of Harvard Business School and Thomas Hellmann of the Sauder School of Business as ‘The First Deal’. Indeed, splitting equity can be an unpleasant process and source of discord within founding teams. In light of important research done by Wasserman and Hellmann indicating that splitting equity equally among co-founders is negatively correlated with pre-money valuations, we felt it important to further explore equity splits and how founders incentivize early hires with equity.
Where Are All the Entrepreneurs Gone in Japan?
For a nation that once boasted the likes of Sony, Toyota and Mitsubishi as its entrepreneurial heralds, Japan’s entrepreneurial record in the new millennium is surprisingly sparse. Indeed, entrepreneurs in Japan have become the exception rather than the norm. Common problems faced by aspiring entrepreneurs include the lack of venture capital, labyrinthine government regulations, and the dominance of large companies. Yet for all these factors, it takes two hands to clap – you need both an environment conducive to startups as well as people who aspire to be entrepreneurs.
Exploring the Limits of Social Connections in Entrepreneurship: Friends as Shades
Could having friends be bad for business? In the first installment of this two-part series, we explored social dynamics that could “turn friends into chains.” In this second article, we focus on a more subtle and perhaps more harmful aspect of social connections: their blinding potential
Tiny Particles, Big Ideas: Interview with Firefly BioWorks’ Dan Pregibon
"We don’t believe in building a big expensive machine that does a million things. We would rather create a technology that does one thing very well and fits into an existing workflow," says Dan Pregibon, a recent MIT alum who started Firefly Bioworks, a company focused on developing instruments and diagnostic assays for the detection of clinically relevant biological molecules.
The Value of Loving Your Job: Finding the Right Measure
Finding a strong correlation between “job satisfaction” and “employee performance” has been called the Holy Grail of managerial psychology. Nabil Laoudji, the founder of The Passion Economy, explores the value of employee satisfaction in the workplace.
Three Failures of Willingness to Pay
As an entrepreneur, how should you think about price? If your answer is to conduct a "willingness to pay" (WTP) survey, you've fallen for three poor assumptions that will cost you money.
No CEO? No Problem. – Biotechnology incubators help scientists do science by managing corporate administration.
If you’re a biotechnology innovator, do you really need to dilute your founding equity by adding more founders? Biotechnology incubators provide innovators with an opportunity to move a technology forward with minimal business administration hurdles. Incubators also provide laboratory facilities and support for the science itself.
Exploring the Limits of Social Connections in Entrepreneurship: Friends as Chains
What if having social connections was actually bad for business? The idea sounds incongruous after decades of business schools preaching in favor of “networking”. Now, after years of fruitful exploration of the positive aspects of social relationships, management scholars are also starting to understand their limits. It even appears that the power of connections in entrepreneurship and beyond may have been exaggerated, at least in part.
Do You Have the Right Stuff? The Five Labors of the Entrepreneur.
For many, entrepreneurship has become a career option among many others. Yet, decades of research on entrepreneurship have shown that it is precisely not an option like others. Here is why.
