Science of Startups Initiative

The Science of Startups Initiative

Research initiative at the Oxford Internet Institute studying and innovation ecosystems, startup formation and entrepreneurship through big data and social science methods.

About the initiative

The Science of Startups Initiative studies creative destruction, i.e. how do new technologies become new products through entrpreneurial activity and how does that shape the labour market of the future. We combine computational social science, network analysis and large-scale digital trace data to study start-up formation, innovation dynamics and the emergence of new industries.

Our work connects entrepreneurship research with questions about frontier technologies, labour demand, regional ecosystems and the future of work.

Technologies

We look at technologies as drivers of innovation.

Startups

We study founders, firms, and startup ecosystems.

Labour Markets

We analyse how startups create new tasks and job profiles.

Our research areas

We study how startups emerge, grow and shape innovation ecosystems. We focus on startups because they are the catalysts of innovation: they connect new technologies to markets, investors, firms and workers.

Our research looks at this process from three sides: the technologies that create new opportunities, the startups that test and scale them, and the labour-market changes that follow when technologies are adopted in practice.

Supported by