High-skilled immigrants contribute substantially to U.S. entrepreneurship, but the path the entrepreneurial success might differ for immigrants versus those born in the U.S. For instance, networking is key to business success, but do immigrants and non-immigrants network in the same way?
Sari Pekkala Kerr, Ph.D., economist and senior research scientist, is studying this issue with William R. Kerr, Ph.D., of Harvard Business School. In “Immigrant Networking and Collaboration: Survey Evidence from CIC,” a newly published paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Kerr and Kerr found that immigrants at entrepreneurial coworking spaces took more advantage than non-immigrants of networking opportunities, especially around exchanging advice.
This shows immigrants are getting greater value out of these communities, but, “there remains much to be explored about how [immigrant entrepreneurs’ preferences and interactions shape the communities of which they are becoming an ever-larger share,” write Kerr and Kerr in a blog post about the study.
Kerr discussed these findings and her other research on immigrant entrepreneurs at the International Metropolis Conference in Ottawa, Canada, in June 2019 and at the Productivity Seminar hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA, in April 2019.
