The Medici effect: multidisciplinary insights for entrepreneurship research

Abstract

In the 15th century, the Medici family in Italy sponsored artists, philosophers, scientists and financiers from various fields (Hibbard, 1974). The most prominent role of the Medici family was to gather people together to share intellect from each discipline (Padgett and Ansell, 1993). Eventually, people in this network led the historical period of innovation known as the Renaissance. Those included Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, Raffaello Sanzio, Donatello and Sandro Botticelli. "The Medici effect" represents a practical illustration of promoting innovation through collaboration across different knowledge domains and the sharing of diverse perspectives and experiences (Johansson, 2004). The Medici effect suggests innovation flourishes when ideas and concepts from diverse disciplines, fields and cultures intersect (Johansson, 2017).The importance of sharing different perspectives and promoting interdisciplinary thinking was certainly not an invention of the Medici family. We find evidence of its effectiveness long before the Medici emerged and long after their influence faded through the centuries. We can travel around two thousand years to the past and observe the Romans combining civil engineering, hydraulics, materials science and geography to develop the aqueduct system. This crucial and value-creating invention has continued its progress as these domains develop and new domains appear. More recently, we can see how the smartphone relied on technological developments from diverse fields such as telecommunications, computer science, materials science, geospatial technology, electronics engineering and consumer behavior to produce one of the most influential products of the 21st century.We can certainly bring the Medici effect to a closer scholarly application. If we turn our attention to social science research, some of our established theoretical frameworks reflect successful combinations of different fields of knowledge. For example, agency theory has strong foundational roots in economics, relying on concepts such as information asymmetry, incentive alignment or utility maximization (Fama and Jensen, 1983;Jensen and Meckling, 1976). We have seen its application in finance as we understand relationships between shareholders and managers in public firms (Eisenhardt, 1989); in corporate governance as we study dynamics in the boardroom, the design of contracts and monitoring mechanisms (Dalton et al., 1998) or in psychology as we study human motivations, cognitive biases and deviations from profit-maximizing behavior (Bazerman and Moore, 2012).Nevertheless, how does our field of entrepreneurship stand on this front? Have we been successful in replicating the Medici effect? The answer to this question may show mixed results. On the one hand, we have seen the application of established frameworks such as resource-based view, social networks, human capital or institutional theory to entrepreneurship settings (Lee et al., 2023). Some influential frameworks, arguably more specific to NEJE 27,1