History of Entrepreneurship

Message from the Historian Committee Chair (July 2023):
Committee Membership Updates and Oral History Project

It's an honor to serve as ENT Division Historian. I'm grateful to my predecessor, Franz Lohrke (Auburn U.), for his excellent leadership and service in this role over the past five years. Thanks as well to committee members Annaleena Parhankangas (Iowa State U.) and Andrea Colli (Bocconi U.), whose terms are concluding in 2023, for their valuable contributions and service to the committee and to the Division.

Our new historian committee members are Gianpaolo Abatecola (U. of Rome Tor Vergata), Susan M. T. Coombes (Virginia Commonwealth U.), and Dimo Dimov (U. of Bath). We'll also welcome a couple additional members over the next 1-2 years to promote operational continuity and preserve institutional memory for the committee, and the Division, as terms continue to expire. If you're interested in serving, then please connect with me at the 2023 AOM meeting.

On behalf of the historian committee and ENT Division leadership, I'm excited to share that we're planning to undertake an oral history project over the coming 3-4 years. The project is still forming, but we've coordinated with the Oral History Association to identify a trained historian with expertise and experience executing successful large-scale oral history research projects. Undertaken in close coordination with ENT Division leadership, the project will entail a structured and rigorous approach to interviewing various architects of the Division and pioneers in the entrepreneurship field over the past several decades. We intend for this work to complement and extend the written history of the ENT division compiled by earlier historian committees (Hans Landström and Jon Lindhe, 2015; Franz Lohrke, 2022). We plan for the final product to be widely available and accessible on an internet-based platform. We expect it to be of interest to today's and tomorrow's ENT Division members and to entrepreneurship scholars and practitioners worldwide. Its impact will include a clearer sense of the historic evolution and future trajectory of the ENT Division—and the field of entrepreneurship—in a larger social context and in the spirit of the historian committee's vision statement: "Seeing the future by understanding the past."

This oral history project will offer high-visibility sponsorship opportunities. It will also generate opportunities for collaboration with Management History and other AOM divisions on PDWs or other program listings at future annual meetings. Please contact me or any member of the historian committee if you are interested in getting involved or learning more.

Patrick J. Murphy
University of Alabama at Birmingham
ENT Division Historian and Committee Chair

(Past messages)

Historian Committee

Patrick J. Murphy (Chair)
Gianpaolo Abatecola
Susan M. T. Coombes
Dimo Dimov

History of the Division

The History of the Entrepreneurship Division by Hans Landström and Jon Lindhe v.1

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The History of the Entrepreneurship Division by Hans Landström and Jon Lindhe v.2

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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).