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Digital technologies’ emergence has changed firms’ innovation and entrepreneurship activities significantly. While the prior literature has investigated how digital technologies stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship, the challenges of the digital transformation process have received limited attention in the information systems (IS) literature. This dissertation aims to examine these challenges by studying policies and governance in the fields of intellectual property, data privacy, and digital infrastructure. In the first essay, I argue that the inefficient protection of employees’ intellectual property rights hampers their innovation activities at work. The second essay evaluates data privacy regulations’ impact on mobile app entrepreneurship. The third essay investigates how mobile platforms’ open policy impedes the adoption of innovative features in operating system (OS) updates. These three essays provide theoretical contributions to the literature on digital transformation, innovation, and entrepreneurship. They also offer practical insights for policymakers and digital infrastructure professionals about how to address digital transformation challenges in innovation and entrepreneurship. / Business Administration/Management Information Systems

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How might ownership of intellectual property rights (IPRs) bring about sustainable socioeconomic development for women entrepreneurs in the emerging cosmetics sector of Nigeria? This research question is motivated by the observation that despite the very significant economic role women entrepreneurs in Third World countries play, their economic status remains low. This low status is a result of various factors including limited access to formal finance mechanisms, high cost of finance and other infrastructural deficiencies, as well gender discrimination. Since the protection of intellectual property (IP) is claimed to be an effective strategy to sustain the growth and development of entrepreneurship, in this thesis I examine whether the IP regime engenders the development of women entrepreneurs in Third World countries. Using trademarks as an exemplar of IPRs and a case study of women entrepreneurs producing cosmetics in Nigeria, I carry out a nuanced analysis that questions assumptions about the role of the IP regime in the improvement of women's businesses in Third World countries. Through an intersectional lens, I explore whether and/or how to localize IP's impact in the context of complex global issues regarding IP protection. Deploying feminist methodology guided by theoretical frameworks of feminist theory and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), this thesis draws attention to the politics of gender and racism in the IP system and how this is exacerbated for women entrepreneurs in Third World countries. The thesis while acknowledging the importance of IP protection, finds that the current IP regime does not accommodate the innovations of women entrepreneurs in Third World countries like Nigeria, that semi and informal IP appropriation like secrecy, are more utilized by women entrepreneurs, and that gender plays a significant role in their acquisition and exploitation of formal IPRs. The thesis concludes that the IP regime as currently framed plays no role in the development of women entrepreneurs in Third World countries, and recommends amongst others, that a gender based legislative impact assessment of IP laws be carried out in Nigeria to ensure gender transformative reforms, and that the content of IP education be revolutionized to reflect the realities of women entrepreneurship in Third World countries.

The tremendous spreading of multimedia via Internet motivates the watermarking as a new promising technology for copyright protection. This work is concerned with the design and development of novel algorithms in the spatial and transform domains for robust and secure watermarking of coloured images. These algorithms are adaptive, content-dependent and compatible with the Human Visual System (HVS). The host channels have the ability to host a large information payload. Furthermore, it has enough capacity to accept multiple watermarks. Abstract This work achieves several contributions in the area of coloured images watermarking. The most challenging problem is to get a robust algorithm that can overcome geometric attacks, which is solved in this work. Also, the search for a very secure algorithm has been achieved via using double secret keys. In addition, the problem of multiple claims of ownership is solved here using an unusual approach. Furthermore, this work differentiates between terms, which are usually confusing the researchers and lead to misunderstanding in most of the previous algorithms. One of the drawbacks in most of the previous algorithms is that the watermark consists of a small numbers of bits without strict meaning. This work overcomes this weakness III in using meaningful images and text with large amounts of data. Contrary to what is found in literature, this work shows that the green-channel is better than the blue-channel to host the watermarks. A more general and comprehensive test bed besides a broad band of performance evaluation is used to fairly judge the algorithms.

The major themes of this thesis are the impact of Intellectual Property (IP) systems on foreign direct investment spillovers and bilateral FDI flows. This thesis consists of three empirical studies. The first study integrates in the existing theoretical frameworks the distinct effect of the public IP enforcement element of IP systems on FDI horizontal spillovers. By employing a meta-analysis approach and the ordered probit model estimation technique, it finds that the strength of public IP enforcement in a host country has a positive effect on FDI horizontal spillovers but it dampens the positive effect of IP law protection on FDI horizontal spillovers when it becomes too strong. The second empirical study examines the impact of IP systems on FDI vertical spillovers. This study employs a similar conceptual and empirical approach and finds that the strength of public IP enforcement has a positive effect on FDI vertical spilloversbut a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the strength of IP law protection and FDI vertical spillovers. In the third empirical study, a gravity model is applied to test the effect of IP systems on bilateral FDI flows in OECD countries. Using the Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood, it finds both the strength of IP law protection and the strength of public IP enforcement to have a positive effect on bilateral FDI flows. The broad implication of these findings is that countries should strengthen both their IP law protection and enforcement but apply appropriate measures to mitigate the negative effect resulted from excessive IP protection.

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In this dissertation, I study three economic issues in the field of entrepreneurship and a fourth that looks at the network structure of financial markets. Chapter 1, titled "Patenting and Nascent Firm Performance", examines how patents interact with nascent firm outcomes. The primary motivation follows a puzzle present in the data and discussed in the literature. Patents are prized possessions for business owners but the value that they confer is dubious. In this sample, patenting firms have no better survival rates and have significantly worse profit outcomes. A Oaxaca decomposition demonstrates the reason for this lies with patents' attraction of equity financing. The burden of the equity relationship proves to be a strain on the young firms. Chapter 2, titled "Signal vs Appropriation Value in Patenting" provides insight into the causal connection between patents and equity financing. This chapter also weighs in on the source of the equity firms' attraction to patents. Controlling for unobservable influences via fixed effects regression, the value measured by the coefficient on patent, demonstrates the appropriative value of the patent, rather than the signal value. Further examination reveals that equity firms are very sensitive to the legal status of the firm, eschewing general partnerships. Chapter 3, titled "Peer Effects in Entrepreneurship", studies gender differences in firm financing as a function of response to peers. This research borrows from the social interaction modeling pioneered by Charles Manski by adopting methods to include peer variables. The main finding is that males are positively and significantly affected by peer financing levels but females are not. This result is robust to industry, experience, credit risk, and other financing sources. Chapter 4, "Network Analysis of the S\&P 500", examines the financial market as a network. The literature takes two approaches to performing this analysis but no study has compared the two approaches. This chapter is the first study to compare them and provide insight as to which provides the more descriptive model. The threshold correlation approach provides much more useful results for any kind of analysis involving market connectedness and shock transition dynamics. / Economics