Evasive entrepreneurs innovate by circumventing or disrupting existing formal institutional frameworks. These evasions rarely go unnoticed and usually lead to responses from lawmakers and regulators. We introduce a conceptual model to illustrate the interdependence between evasive entrepreneurship and the regula-tory response that it provokes.
We apply this framework to the case of the file-sharing platform The Pirate Bay (TPB), a venture with a number of clearly innova-tive and evasive features. The platform was a radical, widely applied innovation that transformed the Internet landscape, yet its founders became convicted crimi-nals. Applying the proposed evasive entrepreneurship framework to this case improves our understanding of the relationship between policymaking and entrepreneurship in the digital age and provides a first step toward determining the best responses for regulators confronting evasive entrepreneurship.
