Institutions and Maker Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The nascent research on the maker movement highlights the implicit assumptions embedded in the literature on entrepreneurship and innovation based on a model of closed traditional product development. Instead, the maker culture emphasizes inclusiveness, openness, sharing, and collaboration. To date, we know little about how institutional-level factors (such as intellectual property rights protection, maker culture and access to makerspaces) impact the probability of a maker hobbyist becoming an entrepreneur. We leverage the institutional perspective to examine the differing regulatory, normative and cultural elements with a cross-national study. Thus, via a leading maker community, Hackster IO, we collected data from surveying 3,139 global makers from 99 countries during 2016, providing the first quantitative evidence about the maker movement's impact on firm creation. Our results suggest that having access to makerspaces positively correlates with the likelihood of being a maker entrepreneur. Intellectual property rights protection demonstrated an inverted-U shape relationship with being an entrepreneur. This paper provides the first large quantitative evidence on the wide existence of maker entrepreneurship across the world and how intuitional factors impact the creation of maker-founded firms in different societies.