Peter Nardulli
Cline Center for Democracy and Political Science,
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
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Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Economic Growth: A Global Examination
The Societal Infrastructures and Development project (SID) of the Cline Center for Democracy addresses one of the most perplexing challenges of the 21st century: How can we enhance the quality of life for people throughout the world? The Cline Center seeks to provide a knowledge base to assist practitioners in their efforts to better the human condition, as well as analytic tools and approaches that will be useful in directing and evaluating their efforts. The SID project focuses on the role of national institutional designs in fostering societal welfare. The Center has begun to gather a wide range of data on the political, economic, and legal systems of 177 nations for a time frame that extends from 1946, the end of World War II, into the indefinite future. As well, contextual data and welfare indicators are being assembled. Three institutions are at the heart of current thinking about institutional designs and social welfare: democracy, free enterprise and the rule of law. As a starting point, conceptual models for these institutions have been developed, and three research initiatives have been undertaken that use information technology to create electronic archives of organized and classified data. This additional component of the SID project seeks to extend the existing classification scheme to better capture entrepreneurship/innovation categories. A tentative scheme has been established, and the automatic text categorization program will examine a sample set of 5,000 articles in order to test its appropriateness. A later stage will then involve the examination of the larger archive with the use of the entrepreneurship/innovation categories. This project will provide a unique set of data and innovative investigative tools, for scholars at Illinois and elsewhere, to help in determining how government and economics can best interact to optimize the welfare of society as a whole.
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