At a time of intense global angst about immigration, research shows that when local residents and migrants work together, new entrepreneurial ideas emerge that benefit communities.
“The fundamental question is: Are migrants [pursuing] the same [opportunities] as locals? In that case, they could substitute for opportunities that locals may then have to lose out on,” says Prithwiraj Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School. “Or are they different from locals in ways that add value for both the migrant and the local [populations]?”
Choudhury’s recent study, “Bounded Solidarity: The Role of Migrants in Shaping Entrepreneurial Ventures,” shows that when migrants and local residents put their heads together on developing entrepreneurial ideas, they create ventures that help society more than the ideas created only by locals.
“There’s something that happens during the interaction between a migrant and a local when put together in a room: They write more prosocial ideas compared to two locals,” says Choudhury, who coauthored the paper with Astrid Marinoni of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The research comes as immigration remains a contentious issue around the world. Tensions regularly arise between advocates who point out migrants’ contributions to the workforce and critics who voice concerns about resource allocation and competition for job opportunities.
A boot camp brings groups together
To study migrants’ contributions, Choudhury and Marinoni focused their research on the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which has been actively courting remote workers by offering a $10,000 stipend to those willing to stay for at least a year.
The authors set up a field experiment in which participants attended an entrepreneurial boot camp, where they partnered with other participants to develop ideas for new business ventures over a two-day period. Among the 278 participants, the researchers paired some local residents with fellow locals, then paired other locals with migrants who came from all over the United States and as far away as Africa, the Middle East, and Japan.
“We asked them to write down individually the ideas they wanted to develop, and then they received some training on how to write business plans,” explains Choudhury, who has been studying the costs and benefits of migration for more than a decade. “Then they wrote a business plan together, which could either be one of their ideas, a completely new idea, or a combination of their two original ideas.”
The entrepreneurial ideas ran the gamut, from developing technology ventures and commercial projects to opening new restaurants. To analyze the proposals, Choudhury and Marinoni relied on eight judges with experience in venture capital and entrepreneurship to rate the quality and viability of the ideas. The researchers found little distinction between the ideas offered by locals paired with locals versus locals paired with migrants in several respects; they were all comparable in terms of the quality of the entrepreneurial opportunity and business model, the novelty of the solution, and the potential for future growth.
Making a positive social impact
However, the groups differed on one crucial measure—how likely the ideas were to impact the community. Compared to the teams made up entirely of local residents, the teams with locals mixed with migrants were more likely to address important social problems and help more people, the researchers found.
Testing that data, the researchers subjected both the original ideas and the final proposals to a word analysis. They found that the proposals developed by the mixed groups were more likely to include so-called “prosocial words” indicating a benefit to others, such as “public,” “impact,” and “wellness.”
Choudhury explains this difference through a sociological theory known as “bounded solidarity,” which proposes that when two individuals interact with each other, they bond over the lowest common denominator in their interests.
It’s all about having these creative collisions. The magic really happens in the interaction.
“Applied to this case, the local and the migrant have nothing in common except that they are both citizens of Tulsa society,” Choudhury explains. Two locals, by contrast, are more likely to have other similarities that bond them.
When mixed pairs interacted, they created a “collective identity” that had them recognizing a shared problem or adversity they both faced in their environment. That explained why these groups were more likely to orient themselves toward an idea that had a societal benefit, Choudhury says. The researchers found this pattern playing out in a number of powerful examples:
When a migrant interested in drone technology worked with a teacher interested in school safety, they combined their ideas into a company that used drones to help law enforcement monitor schools.
A migrant interested in opening a bar worked with a local resident, who expressed concern about the high rates of alcoholism in the community; together, they created the idea of opening a bar that served non-alcoholic drinks.
A local resident eager to create gardening trousers with reinforced patches on the knees had a hard time making the venture financially viable until a migrant suggested employing stay-at-home moms to sew the patches, which resulted in creating jobs while also cutting costs.
Fostering ‘creative collisions’
Given the research results, Choudhury suggests that leaders take pains to break down siloed communication and foster closer connections between migrants and local residents to encourage the development of socially beneficial ideas. One example is the Tulsa Remote program, which distributes its $10,000 donation through a dozen dinners over the course of a year while requiring recipients to interact with locals.
A company that employs both migrant and local workers could follow a similar strategy, Choudhury says. “What if you create a Friday brainstorming day, where you ask migrants and locals to creatively combine their ideas to address company or community problems?” he suggests.
On a community level, local governments could also create spaces for residents to interact with migrants. “You could have a coffee session, where people are paired up and share interests, or meetups where locals and migrants come together to do something meaningful, like clean the beach,” Choudhury says.
Government officials may also want to consider providing funding opportunities for mixed founder teams, since these partnerships just might lead to the development of the next entrepreneurial venture that could help solve a critical problem in the community, Choudhury argues.
“It’s all about having these creative collisions,” he says. “The magic really happens in the interaction.”
Image credit: Asset from AdobeStock/Puttachat.
