For decades, many states have created, funded, dropped, and restarted technology-based economic development (TBED) programs to correct network and market failures across the innovation system. While the need for innovation, tech entrepreneurship and the higher-paying jobs resulting from both is widely recognized, the collective value or impact of sustaining a portfolio of state TBED policies and programs has received little empirical analysis. New research published in the Journal of Social Science Research does precisely that and suggests that long-term, historical investments in state-level policies that support entrepreneurship may have helped to accelerate the development of high technology industries.
