HELLO THERE! Claire Ingram Bogusz – recipient of the 2022 Young Researcher Award

She researches digital entrepreneurs who work for a good cause. Claire Ingram Bogusz, Associate Professor at Uppsala University, has been awarded the Young Researcher Prize for her research on collective digital entrepreneurship.

Congratulations on your appointment! How does it feel?

– That’s great of course. It’s exciting that transnational research is being recognized. In my research, I look at digital technologies and how they change entrepreneurship. So it’s somewhere in between entrepreneurship and informatics. I’m glad that the entrepreneurship world sees my research as relevant and important.

You study entrepreneurs working together through digital technology instead of in a traditional entrepreneurial company, for example through DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organisation) with no CEO, board, managers or employees. How does it work?

– It is about solving big complex problems. The entrepreneurs in such a digital organization all have a common goal and are ready to initially work for free “for a good cause”. They contribute different skills – someone offers to program something, another works on a communication strategy for the project.

– There is a large collective-centric project called web3, which is about decentralizing the internet. The goal of the project’s entrepreneurs is to shift the power of the internet from a few tech giants to users. They want to make it fairer and reduce the opportunities for big tech companies to exploit and manipulate us users. There are also DAOs working on climate-related challenges.

– In such an organization, no one is in charge. Often, someone comes up with an idea and creates a digital community where people can communicate through different platforms. And then you start working on the task and “self-organizing”.

What kind of entrepreneurs are jumping on these collective projects?

– Many are ideologically driven. They want a big complex problem to be solved, or at least confronted. Others are just curious and want to be there to learn something. And then there are those who are there out of pure economic speculation. They don’t care so much about complex problems or whether it’s interesting, but whether it might be valuable down the line. Everyone has the same goal, but they deliver based on different motivations.

Why is your research important?

– To understand how contractors collaborate in a context where they are working on a complex challenge and where it can be difficult to agree. But also to understand how to automate parts to make it cheaper and more efficient. And it is interesting to understand how DAOs democratize entrepreneurship by bringing people together.

What are your plans for the future?

– I will continue to study DAOs and blockchain. But I’m also involved in a project on smart cities, how to create autonomous transportation systems. Open AI is another area I am researching. It’s interesting because it’s used by many and is influenced by how it’s used, by whom and for what purpose.

Contact claire@clairebogusz.com

More about the award
Claire Ingram Bogusz is awarded the Young Researcher Award 2022 by the Entrepreneurship Forum. The prize is awarded annually and goes to a researcher who has distinguished themselves through their research in the field of entrepreneurship and small business. Claire Ingram Bogusz’s research is currently funded by WASP-HS and the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.

Read two other ESBRI articles with Claire Ingram Bogusz:
“We need ambitious entrepreneurs“
Digital entrepreneurs navigating uncharted territory