ABSTRACT

When the doctoral student, Iris Beckman, rushed to my office at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in 2004, arms full of various volumes of the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics , wondering why only a handful of entries appeared under “Entrepreneurship,” “Small Business” and even “Innovation,” she was shocked (Beckmann, 2010). But I wasn’t. After all, four years of graduate studies in economics at the University of Wisconsin, topping off a bachelor’s degree in economics, had netted virtually no mention of entrepreneurship. At least small business had made an appearance in the industrial organization literature, under the topic of “sub-optimal capacity,” and innovation was reserved as a special topic at the end of the semester, embedded in research and development, time permitting.