IES Update 2024-2025

This has been an exciting year at the Institute for an Entrepreneurial Society (IES), whose mission is to produce high-quality evidence-based research on the political economy of entrepreneurship, educate future thought leaders in the field, and engage the academic community in explorations of the entrepreneurial society. 

Throughout the year, IES researchers have published extensively. Maria Minniti, IES director, Zach Rodriguez, former IES postdoc and current fellow, and Trent Williams of Brigham Young University, published a study on healthcare in the U.S. appearing in the  Journal of Management. The article shows that allowing healthcare decisions to be made at the local rather than federal level significantly reduced the incidence of infections and deaths during the COVID-19 crisis.  

In a related study, former IES Ph.D. student and current fellow Devin Stein and Minniti published the results of their research on the management of wildfires. Published in the Academy of Management Journal, this article shows that when communities self-organize to manage wildfires and coordinate their actions with state and federal organizations, they experience fewer property losses than communities that rely solely on external interventions. Taken together, these papers provide strong evidence of the importance of local knowledge and decentralized decision-making. 

In the meantime, Cameron Miller, associate professor of management and IES fellow, published a study in Strategic Management Journal, examining how book publishers adjust their product strategy in the age of digitization. He has also been active in the public policy space, writing white papers and editorials examining how proposed regulation of AI will affect the growth of U.S. tech firms and the broader U.S. economy. 

Thanks to a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Roger Koppl, IES associate director, and Kira Pronin, IES postdoctoral fellow, are completing a study of scientific advisory bodies such as the White House COVID-19 Response Team. The project aims to develop a set of organizational and governance principles for scientific advisory bodies. Their paper on this topic is forthcoming in the scholarly journal Public Choice. 

Finally, among other events and initiatives, thanks to a generous grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, as well as support from the Institute for Humane Studies, IES researchers are organizing a workshop on technological innovation to be held in November in Washington, D.C. Workshop participants will include MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Stuart Kauffman, and alum of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Norman Packard, among others. Minniti noted, “The workshop will bring together a fantastic group of leading researchers to discuss a topic with important implications for entrepreneurship and public policy. We are delighted to contribute to this important conversation.”    

IES fellows look forward to another exciting and productive year.