The Annual Conference of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR)

The conference letter provides an overview of the tenth WINIR conference, held in Prague in September 2025, which brought together an international and interdisciplinary community of scholars interested in the study of institutions and their role in economic and social life. The conference focused on how institutions and entrepreneurship interact to promote shared prosperity, while also addressing a wide range of contemporary issues related to governance, innovation, and social change. A central message of the letter is the importance of institutional frameworks in shaping entrepreneurial activity and collective outcomes. The keynote lectures emphasized the limits of uniform, top-down solutions to complex social problems and highlighted the value of bottom-up processes, experimentation, and locally grounded forms of organization. Entrepreneurship was presented not only as an economic phenomenon but also as a broad, socially embedded activity that can emerge within firms, ecosystems, and self-organizing communities. Alongside the keynotes, the conference featured numerous parallel sessions and a dedicated workshop for early-career scholars, showcasing diverse theoretical perspectives, empirical methods, and research topics. Overall, the letter portrays WINIR as a vibrant forum for advancing institutional research, encouraging dialogue across disciplines, and fostering new generations of scholars. It concludes by noting the awarding of the Ostrom Prize and by announcing the next WINIR conference, reinforcing the network’s ongoing commitment to the study of institutions and good governance.