Carlo Altomonte, Marco Antonielli.
Intangible assets are the key to growth in the knowledge economy, but innovative entrepreneurs can find it hard to secure the financing to kick-start their projects. The role of capital and credit markets in procuring funds for innovation is therefore crucial. Twitter is a case in point: financial support offered by early seed investors and venture capitalists in its first years permitted young entrepreneurs to grow a company around the simple idea of a microblogging platform. Started in 2006, after only seven years the microblogging platform went public last November. This is all the more impressive given that Twitter’s most valuable assets are not buildings or equipment, but patents and software or even more ethereal resources such as the interface design, customers data and its 2,000 employees’ human capital. Twitter’s stock market performance since it floated is an indication that these assets are crucial in the knowledge economy [1]. It is probably no coincidence that Twitter was born in the US: the US capital markets, arguably the most developed in the world, make it a favourable location to start up innovative companies.
Πηγή: Bruegel