Entrepreneurship in the public interest : varieties, effects, and the performance of entrepreneurial arrangements.

Abstract

In this dissertation I present three self-contained research papers that examine entrepreneurial efforts to advance the public interest. In the first paper I introduce a novel class of effects caused by digital technology to account for how it expands, maintains, or reduces the influence of governments over citizens. I submit that this class of effects comprises intrusive, unintrusive, and extrusive effects, and distinguish them by the extent to which they shift the influence of governments on social life. In the second paper I examine under which conditions public labs can achieve high performance in pharmaceutical research for neglected diseases. I employ a configurational approach to analyze 195 research projects conducted in 63 public labs in Brazil, a country in which neglected diseases make up the majority of the disease burden. In the third paper I examine capability creation in an ethnographic assessment of cooperation between a leading biopharmaceutical enterprise and its public partners over the course of three years. I develop a comprehensive model of capability creation comprising three generative mechanisms—what I call asymmetries, overflows, and redeployments—and show how each implies different origins and different paces of development. All three papers illustrate how theories, constructs, and models from the entrepreneurship literature can inform key issues of public policy and public well-being.