Seojin Kim

By taking the perspective of markets and enterprise, this chapter synthesizes an extensive body of research on industry emergence, embodying diverse sets of theoretical lenses, levels of analysis, methodologies, and contexts. The chapter delves into temporal patterns of industry emergence and the role of key actors and underlying mechanisms of knowledge building in this process. In doing so, the text highlights human enterprise as a critical microfoundation of industry emergence, with a focus on heterogeneous capabilities of founding/management teams and team formation. The synthesized insights identify critical theoretical puzzles for future research. The chapter proposes an ambitious research agenda that incorporates motivations into human capital of industry emergence and entrepreneurship, extends focus on product champions and intrapreneurs, examines the role of institutional conditions, and investigates industry emergence in developing country contexts.

Managing and leveraging innovation and knowledge generation are key components of value creation by firms in a globally connected world. In this project we analyze innovative activity in the over a 35-year period (1975-2010) to understand the nature and extent of international connectedness of U.S. knowledge networks. Our analysis parses a comprehensive dataset comprising the population of USPTO patents to extract information on inventor co-location. We use this to generate a knowledge map of inventor networks for each of the top 35 Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs), tracking innovative activity and connectedness across geography and over time. We find that in the 1975-90 period, inventor numbers and growth rates tracked overall population numbers, so that the large population centers (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia) accounted for the largest shares. However, in the decades between 1990 and 2010, inventor numbers rose most rapidly in West and South, so that by the end of the period the dominant innovative centers of the country were the Silicon Valley CBSAs of San Francisco and San Jose, Austin, Seattle, Portland and San Diego.