GREDEG Economics Journal Club

The meeting will take place on Monday, April 20  (2:30 PM in Picasso Room)

Fostering Entrepreneurship under Uncertainty: Trade-offs, Learning, and Support Practices

In a context of increasing global and geoeconomic competition, industrial and innovation policies are placing growing emphasis on fostering entrepreneurship and supporting innovative projects. This raises a fundamental challenge: how to design effective forms of support under uncertainty.

This session explores this challenge by focusing on the tension between selecting promising projects and allowing for experimentation. Starting from this trade-off, the discussion will highlight how the nature of learning in complex and uncertain environments — as emphasized in the evolutionary perspective — cannot be ignored in the design of effective support policies. It then turns to the broad landscape of entrepreneurial support practices currently in place, looking at how the literature has studied Entrepreneurial Support Organizations and what it tells us — and where our understanding is still limited — about how support is actually provided in practice.

Lorenzo Corno will open the session by introducing this trade-off, drawing on Dewatripont and Maskin (1995) "Credit and Efficiency in Centralized and Decentralized Economies", and by discussing how agents learn and experiment in complex and uncertain environments, based on Dosi, Marengo, and Fagiolo (2005) "Learning in Evolutionary Environments", also incorporating the cognitive and behavioral dimensions.

Building on this conceptual framework, Oge Egwuatu will shift the focus to practice, presenting Bergman and McMullen (2022) "Helping Entrepreneurs Help Themselves: A Review and Relational Research Agenda on Entrepreneurial Support Organizations". The paper reviews the role of Entrepreneurial Support Organizations (ESOs) and provides a systematic overview of how different forms of support are conceptualized and studied in the literature.
Together, the two parts aim to bridge economic theory and management evidence, offering a perspective on both the theoretical challenges and the real-world mechanisms of entrepreneurial support.

For those interested in exploring the evolutionary economics perspective further, we also suggest taking a look at a recent working paper co-authored by Lorenzo: "Behaviours and Learning in Complex Evolving Economies" (Corno, Dosi and Marengo, 2025).