On Thursday, June 14, 2018, Lee Fleming presented at the 2nd annual Conference on Entrepreneurial Financial Management at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, Germany, ironically located at the former headquarters of the East German Government.

Fleming presented research joint with Sandy Yu, a former post doc at the Fung Institute and now at the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management. Yu and Fleming’s research shows that crowdfunding of technology campaigns correlates with firm foundings in geographical region. Unfortunately, it also appears that the wealthy, urban, and more educated regions are more likely to generate such campaigns in the first place, thus making crowdfunding an unlikely candidate to decrease regional inequality.

Fleming also moderated a panel on the “Evolution of exit options for entrepreneurial companies” between Karen Stafford (Intel Capital), Olav Sorenson (Yale University), and Michael Schatzschneider (Euronext). All the panelists agreed that IPOs are less likely recently and that the most likely liquidity outcome for an entrepreneur is through acquisition. Professor Lee Fleming joined the IEOR Department at UC Berkeley in Fall 2011 and is the Faculty Director of the Coleman Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership. He teaches engineering leadership and a capstone lab within the Masters of Engineering curriculum. His research applies machine learning and NLP techniques on large data sets with causal inference models from management and social science. His work investigates how mobility influences creative output, innovative search strategy drives firm performance, non-competes change labor mobility and entrepreneurship, and crowdfunding might reduce regional inequality.

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Lee Fleming on the evolution of crowdfunding, entrepreneurial finance, and entrepreneurship was originally published in Berkeley Master of Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.