Collaborative research: Career Lifecycles of Enterprising Workers in R&D Intensive Industries

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Enterprising individuals build their careers, continuously making choices between staying at the start-ups they create, leaving to engage in serial entrepreneurship, or exiting into paid employment, either alone, as part of a small independent team, or as part of full company acquired by an established firm. These choices are shaped by experiences and constraints and, in turn, affect subsequent career choices and economic outcomes. Greater attention to human capital dynamics by tracing career histories of innovative personnel within and across firm boundaries may provide richer insights into economic dynamism. An examination of factors that impact enterprising workers' career choices can inform science and innovation policy to promote knowledge creation and diffusion. The US Census Bureau Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Project provides near universal coverage that allows the construction of the career histories of enterprising individuals in R&D intensive industries across the 18 year time period from 1991-2008. The research focuses on the fates of these individuals after entrepreneurial activity by examining the paths that individuals take after exiting new ventures of different types and by examining the transferability of different entrepreneurial experiences outside of the entrepreneurial context. Family composition constrains geographical mobility which in turn shapes how enterprising individuals build their careers through mobility and entrepreneurship. Together the research explore important individual antecedents to, and consequences of, entrepreneurial activity.