Jamie Jing-Men Wong

JAMIE JING-MEN WONG, then a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, received a grant in October 2019 to aid research on “Data Entrepreneurship and Chinese Political Culture,” supervised by Dr. Graham Jones. Funding allowed the researcher to shadow VC investors as they traveled to different parts of China to engage with local government officials, universities, and other VC investors. This has resulted in a clearer understanding of the network of influence, power, and credibility within the Chinese VC landscape, and enables comparison of what is specific and generalizable in different VC settings. Furthermore, this research illuminates the specific arrangements of co-dependencies and co-production between universities and the VC industry in this current configuration of the university-industrial complex to commercialize innovation. Lastly, by attending to the interaction between different VCs, this research probes the social practices that uphold start-up companies’ values.