I am pleased to report that the Entrepreneurship Division’s Oral History Project is complete. Launched in early 2023, the project has captured primary source accounts from individuals who shaped the Division’s early years. These accounts preserve firsthand perspectives on the establishment of the AOM's Entrepreneurship Interest Group fifty years ago, the formal founding of the Entrepreneurship Division forty years ago, and many of the trends that have unfolded from those periods to the present day. Importantly, the project was completed while many of these foundational figures are still with us.
The work was conducted with two experienced oral historians from the Oral History Association, a UAB Libraries curation and archiving team, and several research assistants from the UAB Department of History. The collection was designed, executed, and constructed according to professional oral history standards. The resulting collection comprises streamable and downloadable videos, transcripts, full indexing, QR codes for each individual case, and supporting materials. Fully searchable and openly accessible to scholars worldwide, the archive is now permanently preserved in perpetuity as a digital archive. It is available here.
I directed the oral history project with valuable contributions from Historian Committee members Gianpaolo Abatecola, Susan Coombes, Dimo Dimov, Luisa Guimarães, and Dan Wadhwani, and with strong support and helpful input from the Division's Executive Committee and AOM leadership
The collection is already informing at least two active research projects and is proving highly valuable as a source for review-style conceptual history research. It will also serve as an excellent resource in doctoral seminars, helping to train the next generation of entrepreneurship scholars. By preserving these foundational stories as primary sources, the collection will help the Division to build its future more purposefully and strategically in the decades to come through a deeper and richer understanding of its past.