Události

Presenter: Šimon Trlifaj (CEU, UNU-MERIT) 

Title: "Equitable innovation: startups attenuate demographic disparities in biomedical, cultural, and commercial markets" (joint work with Yian Yin (Cornell University))

Abstract: New inventions often focus on the privileged and neglect the underrepresented. Large incumbent firms are typically the focus of public, regulatory and business initiatives to attenuate gender, race, and ethnic disparities in innovation. Here, we present large-n evidence that startups, in contrast to incumbents, play a disproportionate role in innovating for underrepresented groups across new products in biomedical (patents), cultural (movies), and commercial (retail) domains. This pattern is consistently stronger in categories and time periods of greater underrepresentation. Leveraging a regulatory shift in biomedical innovation, our results show that as that as female-oriented innovation mainstreamed, the role of startups in innovating for female weakened. This dynamic cannot be simply explained by startups employing more underrepresented inventors and creators (social push) or attending to lower- or higher-income consumers (market pull). We propose a simple profit-seeking explanation for this pattern (competitive fill), where startups attend to the needs of underrepresented groups as they seek underserved consumer niches.

Link to join online: https://cerge-ei.webex.com/cerge-ei/j.php?MTID=mf0cd7de52ce1d5a8334806f9cb9e3065
Meeting number: 2744 980 9988
Meeting password: 792439