About the Center
The McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy was founded in 2015 with an $8 million gift from the Robert and Janice McNair Foundation. Dr. Edward J. Egan was chosen as the founding director. He designed the center to provide policymakers, scholars, and the general public with comprehensive analyses of the issues that affect entrepreneurship and innovation at three levels: federal and state policy, municipal ecosystems, and academic entrepreneurship and innovation.
The Center’s foci were naturally on the U.S., Texas, Houston, and Rice University, but it also drew and shared insights from the best practices and policies worldwide. Its philosophy was to combine grounded theory and data-driven causal design to produce peer-reviewed research that stands up to scrutiny. To this end, the center collected and disseminated data, provided open access to informational resources, collaborated with leading academic experts, built understanding, and recommended policy to harness the incredible power of entrepreneurship and innovation.
By 2018, the McNair Center had provided more than 70 undergraduate and graduate students with internships to develop policy research, had a staff of four, and was the largest social science research laboratory on the Rice University Campus. It received offers of an additional $6.2m in funding to hire three more fellows and two more staff members and to roll out its nationwide research affiliate program.
Student Articles
Some of the best articles written by students at the McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Rice University’s Baker Institute are below. The full collection of McNair Center articles is archived for future generations of entrepreneurship and innovation policy researchers.
Bureaucracy and Public Sector Innovation
The public benefits greatly when there are innovations in how our government approaches policymaking and regulation. However, sometimes barriers created by bureaucratic structures can slow implementation. When regulation and rigidity are holding us back, leaders are responsible for ensuring that our government institutions are allowing for change when our old ways of approaching challenges become…
Congress Turns Its Attention to Entrepreneurship and Innovation—But Does It Take Effective Action?
Legislation passed during the first three months of the 115th Congress pays disproportionate attention to entrepreneurship and innovation. McNair Center research shows that in a typical congressional session, less than 2 percent of legislation introduced is relevant to E&I issues. As of March 23, three of the ten bills that have become law during the 115th Congress directly address entrepreneurship and…
The Right to Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship and human rights are not frequently mentioned in the same conversation in the United States. However, in international policy, human rights and entrepreneurship are linked by many common policy goals, including enforcing the rule of law, improving infrastructure and fighting corruption. Rights necessary to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors–like the right to participate in the economy, the rights to…
MassChallenge: Connecting Startups and Big Business
Corporations and startups are moving toward early stage interactions. MassChallenge, a highly successful nonprofit accelerator, has been connecting corporations and startups since its 2010 launch in Boston. MC has several US and international locations, which accelerated 372 startups in 2016. MC delivers positive results and has been listed among the Best Startup Accelerators by the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project, led by…
Reducing Recidivism through Entrepreneurship
Reducing Recidivism through Entrepreneurship High rates of recidivism in the United States negatively affect prisons, inmates, the government and tax-paying citizens. In 2013, the U.S. imprisoned 2,220,300 people. A Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that within three years of release, 67.8% of released prisoners were rearrested. Within five years, 76.6% of released prisoners were…
Visit the Research Wiki
The other side of this website hosts a Semantic MediaWiki-based collaboration platform, which provides a development environment, documentation, and content, for economic research. Previous incarnations of this wiki supported my colleagues at U.C. Berkeley, the NBER patent data project, the McNair Center, the Kauffman Incubator Project, and research done by some affiliated economists. It is now (largely) open to the public, and may be of interest to economists, other social scientists, computer scientists, and data scientists, as well as some finance professionals. It has almost 3,000 pages of content, developed by about a hundred team members, including the background material for many of the articles archived on this site.
Research
Become an affiliate and develop academic research using the wiki, or view hundreds of summaries of research articles and U.S. federal legislation.
Library
Discover thousands of pages of information about everything from our research computing infrastructure to the economics of true love.