Third Conference on Economics of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Please contact Amy Marshall at amarshall@business.queensu.ca for further information.

Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
May 20-22, 2010

Conference Program

Prof. Jean de Bettignies, in collaboration with Prof. Ajay Agrawal from the Rotman School of Management and Prof. Doug Cumming from the Schulich School of Business, is organizing the third academic conference on applications of economics to innovation and entrepreneurship.

The conference, which is sponsored by QSB, the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management, and Industry Canada, is to take place at Queen's School of Business on May 20-22, 2010.

It will include 12 top scholars in the field, who will present their research or discuss that of other presenters, take stock of the current state of the art, and suggest avenues for future research. The first two conferences of this type were organized at QSB in June 2008 and June 2009, and were an enormous success, placing QSB on the global map as an place where strong research on economics, entrepreneurship and innovation is conducted and promoted.

While innovation has traditionally been a central theme in economics and in the Industrial Organization subfield especially, entrepreneurship, in contrast, received little interest in the economics literature until fairly recently. In the past 10-15 years, however, the situation changed dramatically, as a number of economists became interested in the various topics associated with new venture creation. Indeed, theorists and empiricists alike started applying economic tools to entrepreneurship, bringing this research area to the foreground of economics. Today, entrepreneurship/innovation sessions are a regular feature at economics and finance conferences, and papers on the topic are prevalent in top economics and finance journals, which regularly devote special issues to that area of research.

The purpose of this conference is three-fold:

• To promote research on applications of economics to innovation and entrepreneurship broadly defined
• To help faculty and graduate students build a tighter network amongst scholars interested in this area of research
• To learn from the top scholars in the field, to take stock of the current “state of the art,” and to identify promising new avenues for future research.