How Entrepreneurs Came to Own Innovation: The Rhetoric of Economic Risk in High-Tech

How did innovation come to be synonymous with entrepreneurship? How did creativity become equated with risk? Perhaps more importantly, how did these concepts lead to advice such as that given by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: “Need a Job? Then Invent One?”
This talk will present research on the first wave of employees with dot-com start-ups of the 1990s and 2000s who exhibited entrepreneurial behavior in their jobs–investing time, energy, and other personal resources–when they themselves were employees and not entrepreneurs. I argue that this “venture labor” is part of a longer and broader social shifting of economic risk to individual responsibility and understanding it is of paramount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainable work environments in high-tech sectors today.

发言人详细信息

Gina Neff is an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington. She studies the contemporary economics of media production and the impact of new technologies on communication, focusing on both high-tech and media industries. Her book Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (MIT 2012) examines the risk and uncertainties borne by New York City’s new media pioneers during the first dot-com boom. She co-directs the Project on Communication Technology and Organizational Practices, a research group studying the roles of communication technology in the work around building design and construction. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, and she is currently at work on a three-year project funded by Intel studying the impact of social media and consumer health technologies on the organization of primary care.
She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, where she remains an external faculty affiliate of the Center on Organizational Innovation. She is currently a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy and visiting scholar at NYU’s Media, Culture and Communication department. She has held appointments at UC San Diego, UCLA, and Stanford University. In addition to academic outlets, her research and writing have been featured in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Fortune, The American Prospect, and The Nation.

日期：
演讲者：
Gina Neff
所属机构：
U of Washington/Princeton