Timothy Bernarr Folta

Director, Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Professor and Wolff Family Chair in Strategic Entrepreneurship

Primary Research Theme

Economic and Community Development

Secondary Research Themes

Governance and Urban Services

Research Interests

Two streams are represented by my urban-related research. I have a number of papers on agglomeration economies, addressing how firms and regions benefit by co-locating in a region, and any constraints to these economies. I also do a lot of work on entrepreneurship, studying the factors that inspire entrepreneurs to enter or exit markets, and regional influences obviously play a role. Increasingly, this work centers on entrepreneurial policy.

Recent Cities-Related Projects

  • Does Government Fund the Best Entrepreneurial Ventures? The Case of the Small Business Innovation Research Program: Policy makers around the world are increasingly interested in spurring entrepreneurship by providing capital to promising ventures and often develop government programs designed to do so. Whether governments can effectively identify and reward the most promising ventures is a topic of considerable debate. We examine the selection capabilities of the largest such government program in the United States – The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant.
  • Performance differentials within geographic clusters: Increasing evidence indicates that firms benefit from a location in a geographic cluster of similar firms. The literature is nearly silent, however, on whether agglomeration economies accrue symmetrically across clustered firms. We investigate which firms benefit most from agglomeration.
  • Selecting Entrepreneurs to Fund Through Government Agencies: Who should government agencies put on their selection committees to fund entrepreneurial ventures? What makes review teams particularly effective in their capacity to fund the right research? Does having prior private sector/commercialization experience improve the effectiveness of public sector grant reviewers in selecting the right projects to fund?