rESEARCH & rEPORTS
Engine Foundation conducts original research on high-tech entrepreneurial activity that informs our advocacy, outreach, and communications initiatives.
Featured Reports
Engine Foundation conducts original research on high-tech entrepreneurial activity that informs our advocacy, outreach, and communications initiatives.
A look at how punitive trade policy that focuses on the imposition of new tariffs undermines goodwill with trading partners, invites retaliatory trade barriers, and threatens the vitality of digital trade policies relied upon by startups.
Artificial intelligence is a foundational technology driving innovation in every corner of the economy.
To help policymakers better understand what these issues mean for startups and their users, we’re releasing an updated version of the report, one-pager, and video explainers of the impacts of age verification and the policy proposals that prompt it.
The U.S. startup ecosystem is anchored by the premise that anyone—no matter their race, gender, sexual identity, background, or location—with an idea and the will, can launch a startup and grow a successful company.
How determining user age impacts startups
Building on Engine’s previous research on the role of acquisitions in the startup ecosystem, Engine today released a report examining the ways that acquisitions are a critical component of the startup ecosystem, featuring over a dozen startup founders, investors, and accelerators.
Data privacy has been top of mind for consumers, policymakers, regulators, companies, and entrepreneurs for the past several years, in the wake of broad privacy rules in the EU, and action in several U.S. states. The U.S., which has long had a sectoral approach to privacy, remains without a comprehensive privacy framework, and many states have reacted by proposing, passing, and implementing their own varying—and potentially conflicting—comprehensive privacy laws.
The startup ecosystem is an interdependent system of startups, support organizations, investors, service providers, and others working to support startup growth and success through the provision of guidance, capital, and other critical resources. Each of these components is critical to the success of individual startup ecosystems all across the country and the growth of the overall U.S. startup ecosystem.
The U.S. startup ecosystem is defined by dynamism. Startups are constantly being founded, earning investment, growing, exiting, and—yes—failing in cities and towns all across the country. Startup exits and investment are two intimately related and important drivers of this dynamism critical to economic growth and innovation in the startup ecosystem. Startup exits—both those that are profitable and those that are not—promote the building of knowledge, recycling of talent, and flow of capital through the ecosystem. Each of those components are key to building new startups and stimulating the investment needed to grow them to scale.
Today, Engine issued a paper focused on the policy insights needed—and the legislative actions required—to adequately support the expanse of the startup ecosystem, and to grow the innovation economy. We hope this paper can serve as a resource for policymakers considering a wide range of policy issues that impact early-stage companies across the country.
Debates about the intermediary liability framework provided by Section 230 have animated policy conversations as lawmakers grapple with harmful online content, including around election integrity, health information, and children’s safety. But those debates are almost exclusively focused on the largest Internet companies. Section 230, however, applies to all services of all sizes that host all types of user-generated content, including startups.
Startups & the U.S. Patent System: Prioritizing Quality and Balance to Promote Innovation
Today, Engine, along with the Charles Koch Institute and Startup Genome, issued a report looking at the overall health of the startup ecosystem. We hope this report can serve as a resource for policymakers considering a wide range of policy issues that impact early-stage companies across the country.
Despite how often we use encryption—and how prominent the encryption debate has become in policy circles—few understand how it actually works.
In this report, and through a series of events in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2019, Engine and the Charles Koch Institute sought to unpack the nuts and bolts of content moderation. We examined what everyday content moderation looks like for Internet platforms and the legal framework that makes that moderation possible, debunked myths about content moderation, and asked attendees to put themselves in the shoes of content moderators.
Whether it’s the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or the looming California Consumer Privacy Act, policymakers across the world are grappling with what steps they can take to better safeguard consumers’ online data while promoting competition and innovation.
The pace of high-tech employment growth has been on a steady decline over the past two years. Despite growing substantially faster than total employment coming out of the Great Recession, job growth in high-tech industries and STEM occupations has slowed to match the anemic pace of job growth across the economy as whole. It goes without saying that a decline in these high-value jobs is not a welcome development for the U.S. economy.
Engine's Research Director Ian Hathaway recently spoke with Jason Grill on Entrepreneur KC Radio on how high-tech startups create jobs. Referencing his recent research on the impact of startups on job creation and growth, Ian also specifically highlights the unique conditions that have led Kansas City to become a growing hub for tech entrepreneurship.
This summer, we released a new paper with the Kauffman Foundation that looks into the impact of high-tech startups on job creation and economic growth. To help us explore this issue, and the role policy can play in fostering growth, for this episode Mike McGeary is joined by Engine’s Research Director, Ian Hathaway, Dane Stangler, Director of Research and Policy for the Kauffman Foundation, Jim Franklin, CEO, and Tim Falls, Director of Developer Relations, from Boulder-based startup Sendgrid, and Robert Litan, Director of Research at Bloomberg Government.
California Governor Jerry Brown signed a new law that amounts to a big victory for startups and their investors. Assembly Bill No. 1412 reverses a 2012 adjustment that would have resulted in massive retroactive taxes on investors and small business owners. Engine’s estimate on the new rule's impact on startups empowered advocates looking to overturn the adjustment with a data-rich perspective on future investment, business, and employment growth.
All over the country, new and young businesses—as opposed to small businesses generally—play an outsized role in net job creation in the United States. But not all new businesses are the same—the majority of entrepreneurs to-be don't intend to grow their businesses or innovate. Differentiating growth-oriented “startups” from the rest of young businesses is an important distinction that we make in this latest paper.
Across the country and far beyond Silicon Valley, new centers of startup activity are on the rise. Among them, Miami, Florida is one of the more exciting and dynamic cities emerging as a hub for startups. Not only are more entrepreneurs calling Miami home, but a real ecosystem is forming, complete with a new co-working and events space in the heart of Miami’s Wynwood district, investor groups with a renewed commitment to South Florida entrepreneurs, and a slew of meet-ups, conferences, and hackathons attracting students, programmers, entrepreneurs, and investors eager to be part of this transformation.