Using Crunchbase for economic and managerial research

This note describes a new database on innovative start-ups and companies, called Crunchbase, with a focus on its potential for economic and managerial research. Crunchbase is rapidly being discovered by scholars from different fields. It has notably already informed studies on specific sectors as well as studies of networks in the start-up ecosystem. This note first describes the contents of Crunchbase and then reviews academic research that has used it. We further suggest that many more valuable avenues for economic and managerial research can be opened through the combination of Crunchbase with selected supplementary data sources and provide two such examples.