History of Entrepreneurship

Message from the Historian Committee Chair (July 2022)

If you are interested in the history of entrepreneurship and are looking for a way to serve the Entrepreneurship Division, I encourage you to volunteer for the Historian Committee. The Committee’s mission is “to develop and contribute institutional memory to the workings of the Division,” and we have worked this year on myriad ways to fulfill this mission.

Some recent initiatives include the following:

1. Hosting a PDW for the 2022 Annual Meeting in Seattle. The Committee has historically hosted PDWs on the development of specific entrepreneurship topics and research methods for investigating historical events, as well as highlighted key anniversaries and continued influence of foundational texts and articles. This year, the Committee’s PDW will focus on the historical and continuing impact of Venkataraman’s (1997) chapter, “The distinctive domain of entrepreneurship research,” which provided an important step in clarifying the field’s domain early in its history.

The PDW, entitled "25 years of research based on Venkataraman (1997): Assessing progress and exploring future avenues," will take place on Saturday, August 6, 2022 from 9:00 to 10:30 AM (Pacific Time, UTC-7). We will be conducting it as a hybrid interactive session, so feel free to join us either in-person or virtually.

2. Updating the History of the Entrepreneurship Division written by Hans Landström and Jon Lindhe (see https://bit.ly/ENTDivisionHistory). Published in 2015, their publication continues to serve as a great source of organizational memory about major divisional events as well as a repository listing of interesting information, such as past Division Chairs and winners of the Division’s many prestigious awards.

We are currently updating listings and adding information about some major events (like the Division’s 30^th anniversary celebration in 2016). If you have any suggestions about key events in the life of the Division (or content like pictures from these events) from the past seven years, please feel free to submit them to me.

3. Digitally preserving institutional memory. Working with the Division’s Communication Committee, the Historian Committee has supported the ENT Division’s long-standing presence across multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

So, for example, if you want to see who received awards at last year’s Business Meeting, you can view it in its entirety at https://bit.ly/ENTBizMeeting2021. If you want to know who served as officers in 2020 (as well as about the officer nomination process, in general), see https://bit.ly/ENTOfficerNom2020 .

If you are interested in working with the Historian Committee, please contact me at FranzLohrke@auburn.edu.

Best regards,
Franz Lohrke
Historian Committee Chair

(Past messages)

Historian Committee Chair

Franz Lohrke

History of the Division

The History of the Entrepreneurship Division by Hans Landström and Jon Lindhe

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Pioneer Profiles

William B. Gartner

William B. Gartner is an American entrepreneurship scholar and Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Art of Innovation, at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is also Professor of Entrepreneurship at the California Lutheran University in the US.

Gartner is considered a pioneer within his field, known for his belief in a behavioral approach and narrative methodology in entrepreneurship research. He was one of the first scholars within the field who advocated a shift from focusing on the individual traits of the entrepreneur, which was common during the 70s and 80s, to studying entrepreneurship as a behavioral process (Landström 2010).

Patricia P. McDougall-Covin

Patricia P. McDougall-Covin is an American scholar in the fields of Strategic Management, Entrepreneurship and International Business. She is Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Institute for International Business at Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. McDougall is considered a pioneering scholar of entrepreneurship and strategic management and she has made significant contributions to the knowledge of multinational enterprise (Kelly school of business, 2015).

Arnold C. Cooper

Arnold C. Cooper Professor Arnold Cooper (March 9, 1933 – December 6, 2012) was a management scholar and a pioneer in the field of entrepreneurship and strategic management. During his academic career, that spanned over 40 years, Arnold Cooper made several significant contributions to the overall knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship. He also played a significant part in organizing the research field and he helped the elevation of entrepreneurship research to a higher academic level (Landström, 2010).

Karl H. Vesper

Karl H. Vesper Karl Hampton Vesper (b. 1932) is an American scholar and Professor emeritus of Management, Mechanical Engineering and Marine Studies at the University of Washington(WA). Vesper is known as a pioneer in the field of entrepreneurship research and education. He has launched several entrepreneurship courses and programs, and he has been involved in organizing some of the first conferences on entrepreneurship in the US (Spears school of business 2015).