Thursday, July 4, 2013

GEM Conference (20-21 June 2013)

Following DRUID, I attended a mall conference sponsored by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor team in Spain to promote the use of GEM data.

The use of GEM data is clearly evolving. One of the impressive features of conference was the increasing use of pooled data (compiling the data across a number of years and countries) to build impressively large numbers of observations.

Still a number of the papers were naive or misguided in their choice of variables.

The highlight of the day was a keynote by Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia university.  http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/home.html It was nice to hear an economist focus attention on adoption of innovation not newness per se.

Day 2 brought forth a number of quite interesting papers including one on rent seeking behaviour in MENA countries and another on the role of high tech entrepreneurship across factor driven, efficiency driven and innovation driven economies.

The papers are in early stage development, so I won't reference them.

An interesting conference, but clearly to me GEM is running out of data for interesting academic work, and needs to ask bigger questions like to ones Burton was asking in her DRUID conference talk, see the previous blog for details.

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