Technology Entrepreneurship, the Poor, and Socialism

Abstract

Prior research on technology entrepreneurship has been grounded almost exclusively in capitalist frameworks developed in the Global North. We argue that context matters, and that scholars should examine technology entrepreneurship in the roughly half of the world where socialism provides the economic foundation. As a step in this direction, we investigate how the principle of common prosperity shapes technology entrepreneurship in socialist contexts. Focusing first on China-a global technological leader and one of the world’s largest generators of patents-we show through two cases that concern for the poor is not incidental but integral to technology entrepreneurship under socialism. We then..