AOM Entrepreneurship Division 
Financial Position 

January 2024
Maribel Guerrero
AOM ENT Division Treasurer

Message from Division Chair

November 2023
Jon Carr
AOM ENT Division Chair

Message from Immediate Past Division Chair

September 2023
April Franco
AOM ENT Immediate Past Division Chair

Message from the Program Chair

May 2023
Rachida Justo
AOM ENT Division Program Chair

Highlights from the 2023 Mid-winter Meeting of Entrepreneurship Division’s Leadership

March 2023
Diane M. Sullivan
AOM ENT Division Secretary

The AOM Entrepreneurship Division Financial Position:
An update in the COVID-19 Era

January 2023
Maribel Guerrero
AOM ENT Division Treasurer

Message from Division Chair

November 2022
April Franco
AOM ENT Division Chair

It is an honor and pleasure to serve as Chair of the Entrepreneurship Division! We continue to be the fourth largest Division in the Academy of Management with 3,789 members.  More than a quarter of our members are students, which aligns well with our mission to “grow entrepreneurship scholars.” The academic field of entrepreneurship continues to thrive and grow in importance with exciting developments in research, teaching, and outreach; the ENT Division aims to be at the center. Whether your primary interests are concepts and theory, quantitative or qualitative empirical work, education, consulting, public policy, or journalism, the Division has a place for you. Like some of you, I have been involved in this area when it wasn’t the hot topic; I am so pleased to see that the field has grown in importance. Entrepreneurship studies now address issues such as creativity, judgment, innovation, industry evolution, economic growth, entrepreneurial finance, law, technological, social, and cultural effects of entrepreneurship, just to name a few. We’re glad the Entrepreneurship Division can support so many different researchers, interests, and questions!

This year has been another challenge for all of us, personally and professionally. I want to thank each of you for making the 2022 hybrid conference such a success. It was great to see so many folks in-person and online! What a treat after two years of online offerings. As we look forward to the future, we are hoping to use some of the lessons from the past two years to help us improve the Division’s support of members in all areas of research, pedagogy, and practice. We had an amazing program that was organized by Rachida Justo as PDW Chair and Jon Carr as Program Chair. As we have all learned during the past two years, online and hybrid presentations are not always smooth (though neither are in-person ones!) While the hybrid program was not without its glitches, our membership’s entrepreneurial spirit helped us find ways to overcome any hiccups! Our plenary, paper, panel, consortium, and PDW sessions were well attended and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. This is all due to the dedicated efforts of our Executive Committee, consortium chairs, and volunteers, particularly in this year when things were not just the same as before. There was a lot of time spent creating new processes or looking for the old ones that were used for in-person conferences. This year’s conference felt different, with a heightened level of excitement. I hope that all who attended enjoyed it. For those who were unable to attend, we look forward to seeing you next year. I would like to thank our wonderful membership all for your help and support in the past two years!

I especially want to thank the approximately 150 members of the leadership team and Division committees, under the direction of Program Chair Jon Carr and PDW Chair Rachida Justo, and the roughly more than 800 reviewers who gave their valuable time to help put the program together.

The year ahead

Though we are still waiting on information about the format for the 2023 Annual Meeting., the last couple of years have taught us to do things differently and provide value to our members throughout the year and beyond the Annual Meeting, including virtual workshops and seminars, teaching materials, new media channels and a bolder presence on social media, and more. We are looking at how online events may offer us an opportunity to better serve some of our global outreach constituents throughout the year rather than only during the AOM meeting in August. In line with this, Yuliya Snihur and Denis Grégoire have planned some online events in November to help scholars who may not know how to best prepare a submission to the AOM Conference. You can watch the video records of last year’s events (here and here).

Get involved!

Like other academic organizations, the ENT Division is run entirely by volunteers, and we need your help. Getting involved is a great way not only to serve your fellow members, and the academic entrepreneurship community more generally, but also a way to build relationships and expand your professional network. We have openings on several committees and are always looking for volunteers. You can find a list of committees here. In particular, we are looking for a volunteer in Boston to help by looking at potential event locations, volunteers for the Communication Committee (digital file caretaker, and webmaster), Global Scholar Development Committee, Membership Committee, Mentorship Committee, Research Committee and a new initiative, ENT Ambassadors. Contact me for more information.

Submit and review for the 2023 Conference!

Please submit your best work for the 2023 Annual Meeting. Instructions and deadlines for PDW, symposia, awards, and paper sessions are included in the NewsBlast November issue and will be distributed on the usual channels. Please review the calls from Rachida Justo (Program Chair) and Vishal Gupta (PDW Chair) for paper sessions, symposium and PDW proposals. Ph.D. students who graduated or plan to graduate during the 2022 calendar year should consider submitting to the Heizer or National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) Dissertation Awards. Jon Carr (Chair-Elect) has announced details associated with those submissions on our website.

Of course, if you haven’t yet, please sign up to be a reviewer! Our submission numbers have grown rapidly in recent years and we aim to provide multiple high-quality reviews for each proposal, which requires a large and diverse body of reviewers.

In case you missed it

If you missed our business meeting in August, let me briefly recap some highlights. First, we thanked outgoing officers, committee chairs, and Representatives-at-Large (Franz Lohrke, Frédérick Delmar, Annelore Huyghe, Tim Holcomb) and welcomed new and returning ones: Vishal Gupta (PDW Chair), Diane Sullivan (Secretary), Susan Young (Events Logistics and Planning Committee Chair), Patrick Murphy (Historian), Julio de Castro, Maija Renko, and Per Byland as new RALs and Yuliya Snihur as returning RAL. I am delighted to have such a committed team to help us move forward! Outgoing Chair, Sarah Jack, reported on the Division’s ongoing mentorship initiative, expansion of the Division’s online engagement to support members throughout the year, and the Division’s five-year review report. The feedback from AOM noted that the ENT Division has a highly engaged community, is financially healthy, and has strong governance and leadership. As a result, the Division was renewed. Moving forward, we will look to strengthen our processes and offerings to support our membership. 

We thanked our sponsors: Whitman School of Management/Syracuse University, and the McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership/University of Missouri (Gold Sponsors); IE University, Stockholm School of Economics, Department of Entrepreneurship at Farmer School of Business/Miami University, Department of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and Alabama Entrepreneurship Institute (Silver Sponsors); and Poole College of Management/NC State University, Institute for Entrepreneurship/Colorado State University, and Centre for Family Entrepreneurship and Ownership/Jönköping University (Bronze Sponsors) as well as the Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Entreprise at Hankamer School of Business/Baylor University (Social Event Sponsor), the McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership/University of Missouri, and Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (Doctoral Consortium Sponsors) .

We also recognized the following award winners (and heard prerecorded video greetings from many):

• Mentor Award: Jeffery S. McMullen
• Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award: Jill Kickul​
• Best Reviewer Awards:

Joel Adams*
Jared Shaw Allen
Marieshka Barton*
Flavio Bizarrias
Devin Burnell*
Julio Araujo Carneiro Da Cunha
Sven-olof Collin
Giuseppe Criaco
Josh Daspit
Walker Ray Dornisch*
Juliane Friedrichs*
Richard Hunt
Nancy R. Kucinski
Franz T. Lohrke
Susanna Reetta Emilia Mansikkamäki*
Marie Madeleine Meurer*
Susanna Pinnock*
Esther Salvi*
Raj Krishnan Shankar
Rai Siddhant Sinha*
Etienne St-Jean
Diane McMeekin Sullivan
Matthew Sutter*
Suzana Varga*
Miranda Welbourne Eleazar
Marcus Wolfe
Sibin Wu
(NB *indicates student)

• Best Empirical Paper (sponsored by Kennesaw State University’s Coles College of Business): “Are Angel Investors More Likely then Venture Capitalists to Drive Entrepreneurial Experimentation?” by Amir Sariri
• Best Conceptual Paper: “Looking Back to Speed Forward: Origins, Evolution, Path Forward for Corporate Accelerator Research” by Andreas Leubner, and Siddharth Vedula
• Best Family Business Paper (sponsored by Kennesaw State University’s Cox Family Enterprise Center): “A Straw in the Wind: Media Opinion on the Family and Analyst Responses during Family Firm Succession” by Yanlong Zhang, Chi-Nien Chung, and Yijie Min
• Best Social Entrepreneurship Paper: “The Co-Evolutionary Process of Venture Identify Formation in the Era of Pivots” by Furkan Amil Gur, Christine H. Mooney, and Blake D. Mathias
• Heizer Best Doctoral Dissertation Award (sponsored by Heizer Capital & the family of Edgar “Ned” Heizer, Jr.): Amir Sariri, Purdue University
• NFIB Best Doctoral Dissertation (sponsored by the NFIB): Kylie Jiwon Hwang, Stanford University
• Foundational Paper Award: “Learning from Business Failure: Propositions of Grief Recovery for the Self-Employed” (Academy of Management Review 2003) Dean A. Shepherd
• Helena Yli-Renko Research Impact Award (sponsored by the USC Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies): “Changing with the Times: An Integrated View of Identify, Legitimacy, and New Venture Lifecycles” (Academy of Management Review, 2016), Greg Fisher, Suresh Kotha, Amrita Lahirir.
• Emerging Scholar Award: Regan Stevenson
• Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award (sponsored by Yeshiva University): “Endless Frontier Labs” Deepak Hegde
• Entrepreneurship Practice Award: “The Cape (Community Advancing Pluralism in Entrepreneurship)” Betsy Campbell

We next recognized the new and continuing committee chairs for 2021-2022:

• Awards: Sophie Bacq
• Communications: Lou Marino
• Continuity: Sarah Jack
• Event Logistics and Planning: Susan Young
• Global Scholar Development: Yuliya Snihur
• Historian: Patrick Murphy
• Membership: Annelore Huyghe
• Ad hoc Membership: Sheryl Wintson-Smith
• Nominating: Sarah Jack
• Practitioner Scholar: Ken Grant
• Research: Jeff Pollack
• Teaching: Diana Hechavarria

And the chairs of the 2022 consortia:

• Doctoral Consortium: Charles Murnieks
• Early Career Consortium: Jean Clarke
• Mid-Career Consortium: Carina Lomberg
• Late-Career Consortium: Roland Kidwell

Finally, we thanked Sarah Jack for her outstanding service as 2021-2022 Division Chair. Sarah was an inspiring leader who managed the five-year review process with unflappable aplomb and the Division was so lucky to have her! 

Message from Immediate Past Division Chair

September 2022
Sarah Jack
AOM ENT Immediate Past Division Chair

Thanks to all our members, officers, and volunteers for your fantastic efforts in 2021-22. What a year! Unlike last year’s remote conference and networking, this year started with uncertainty – would we or wouldn’t we be holding an in-person event? Thankfully, everything worked out and it was fantastic to see so many of you in Seattle.

Thanks to our Program Chair Jon Carr and our PDW Chair Rachida Justo for organizing a terrific program for the ENT Division and to all of you who presented, discussed, attended, online and in person, and networked…!

Now we have more of an understanding about how AOM and the ENT Division program might look going forward. The face-to-face conference in Seattle was great, however, the Division will continue to think through how it might use and extend the capabilities it developed so successfully for remote interaction and collaboration. One of the Division’s goals over the past year, and which we will continue to work on this coming year, was how we might continue with these capabilities to deliver more value to you, the members, throughout the year. This includes continuing our virtual mentoring activities via the AOM Connect platform as well as our New Member Committee’s e-encounter program, enhancing our social media presence, and providing new content such as online seminars and workshops and a Meet the Scholar interview series. If you’re interested in volunteering to help with any of these efforts, please do let one of us know!

Our 2022-23 Program Chair Rachida Justo and PDW Chair Vishal Gupta will be working hard to build on our success this year and put on the best possible program for Boston, including looking for ways to incorporate virtual pre- and post-conference elements that add value to the conference. Under the capable leadership of Division Chair April Franco, Chair-Elect Jon Carr, and the rest of the team, the Division is in great shape!


Message from the Program Chair

May 2022
Jon Carr
AOM ENT Division Program Chair

We’re on track for a great Entrepreneurship program in Seattle! For the first time ever, the AOM will offer a hybrid program, with in-person, synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid sessions. This year we received over 900 submissions for the scholarly program! Based on the time units allocated to us by AOM, we were able to accept 530 papers for traditional paper sessions and 38 symposia. The Entrepreneurship Division sessions will be held in a variety of venues, with all the hybrid sessions being offered in the Convention Center.

Thanks to all for your hard work in putting proposals together, and congratulations to those of you who have your submissions accepted. Our Division members are doing fascinating work on a variety of topics, using many different methods, and in several unique contexts; I regret that we were unable to accept more submissions.

With respect to the Program, I thought it might help to describe to you how each of the session delivery modes will work. Of course, the in-person sessions are like our traditional meeting format from the past. For asynchronous sessions, authors provide a recorded video presentation that is uploaded and available on-demand for those meeting participants that wish to see the session. Synchronous sessions are “Zoom-style” sessions, where the moderators and authors are together in a synchronous manner. Papers are presented in a virtual manner, and meeting participants can join these sessions virtually at their designated time. Finally, we are very excited about the hybrid format. In these sessions, it is a combination of in-person and virtual presentations, with authors and participants in a mixed format.

It is important to remember that this is our first time to develop such a program, and so undoubtedly there will be hiccups along the way. In some instances, an author may have to switch modes, so we hope that you are able to “act entrepreneurially” to help make the session happen!

Finally, we will be conducting our first in-person Business Meeting in three years, which will provide an open opportunity for our members to learn more about our present status and future prospects. Long-term, we are very excited about trying to build our Business Meeting in a hybrid format, since it is our overarching goal to give our members multiple ways to engage with other members on important entrepreneurship division news and topics.

Thanks again for all you do to make the Entrepreneurship Division great. I look forward to seeing you (both live and virtually) in Seattle!

Highlights from the 2022 Virtual Mid-winter Meeting of Entrepreneurship Division’s Leadership

March 2022
Diane M. Sullivan
AOM ENT Division Secretary

The 2022 Mid-winter Meeting of the Entrepreneurship Division was hosted this January by the Entrepreneurship Division Chair, Sarah Jack of the Stockholm School of Economics and Lancaster University. For the second time in Division history (the first being in 2021), the Mid-winter Meeting was held in a completely remote format.

Participating in this year’s Mid-winter Meeting were members of the Entrepreneurship Division’s leadership spanning the globe from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

Throughout the meeting, the leadership focused on planning the Division’s activities and events for 2022 hybrid Academy of Management Conference including, in part, planning high-quality consortia and social events, considering new engaging activities throughout the year, and planning other meeting content and experiences relevant to the diversity of interests represented by the Division’s membership.

A number of special topics were emphasized at this year’s meeting. Most notably, Division leaders worked to successfully finalize the Division’s five-year review report. Every five years Divisions are reviewed by the Academy of Management as a means of encouraging reflection and planning for the subsequent five years, as well as receiving feedback from the Academy of Management. For 2022, the Entrepreneurship Division is among the Divisions being reviewed by the Academy. Thus, this important activity held special prominence at the 2022 the Mid-winter Meeting.

Other notable special topics centered on the consideration of the Division’s organizational structure in light of the large size of the Division (Entrepreneurship is the fourth largest Division in the Academy of Management), the pursuit of new strategic initiatives, and the alignment between Division awards and sponsorships.

Overall, the 2022 Entrepreneurship Division Mid-winter Meeting was a productive event for the Division’s leadership, all of whom thank Division Chair, Sarah Jack, for organizing and hosting the event, and for ensuring it ran smoothly.

The AOM Entrepreneurship Division Financial Position:
An update in the COVID-19 Era

January 2022
Maribel Guerrero
AOM ENT Division Treasurer

As the 2019-2021 AOM Entrepreneurship (ENT) Division Treasurer, I was honored to serve our Division with the responsibility to continue the great work of previous treasures. During this period, the purpose of the treasurer report in 2019 NewsBlast and the 2020 NewsBlast was to explain historical financial trends, as well as understand the challenges related to the ENT division goals/projects’ financial sustainability over time. Then, in the 2021 NewsBlast, we described the ENT Division’s financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic effects.

In the 2021 fiscal year, the AOM Annual Meetings’ virtual model continued to diminish several operating expenses (i.e., social and networking events). Regarding income sources, we are very thankful for the division sponsors’ vibrant financial efforts, as well as vital financial allocation from the AOM. In this view, the ENT Division allocated financial resources to achieve strategic goals (i.e., Doctoral Consortium, PDW sessions, Paper sessions, Awards recognitions) and implement new initiatives (i.e., ENT-Encounters mentorships, Symposiums, Workshops, Virtual Social Events).

The Entrepreneurship Division Executive Committee currently creates value through multiple entrepreneurial initiatives and will implement innovative financial strategies “to sustain our goals while remaining financially sound”. We are optimistic that the ENT division will be ready for the new decade’s goals, projects, and opportunities with the ENT community support.

We hope to see you in Seattle!

Best wishes in the new entrepreneurial year, and stay safe!

Message from Division Chair

November 2021
by Sarah Jack
ENT Division Chair

It is an honor and pleasure to serve as Chair of the Entrepreneurship Division! We are now the fourth largest Division in the Academy of Management with 3,724 members. More than a quarter of our members are students, indicating a growing field. The academic field of entrepreneurship continues to thrive with exciting developments in research, teaching, and outreach, and the ENT Division aims to be at the center. Whether your primary interests are concepts and theory, quantitative or qualitative empirical work, education, consulting, public policy, or journalism, the Division has a place for you. The field has grown beyond its origins in small-business management and the startup process to include micro and macro approaches to issues such as creativity, judgment, and decision-making; innovation, industry evolution, and economic growth; entrepreneurial finance, law, and public administration; technological, social, and cultural effects of entrepreneurship; and so much more. We’re glad to have you with us!

This year has been another challenge for all of us, personally and professionally. I want to thank each of you for making the 2021 virtual conference such a success. As entrepreneurship scholars, we know a lot about radical uncertainty, sudden environmental shifts, experimentation and learning, and adapting to unexpected change – skills that have come in handy throughout the last couple of years! Despite a few zigs and zags here and there, our program went off without a hitch (okay, maybe just a few hitches). Our plenary, paper, panel, consortium, and PDW sessions were well attended via the Academy’s platform and its Zoom extensions. Of course, none of this would have happened without the dedicated efforts of our Executive Committee, consortium chairs, and volunteers. In a normal year, putting together the Annual Meeting is a huge undertaking. While the last couple of years have been challenging, we have managed things, thanks to you all for your help and support with the online format we have had to adjust to.

I especially want to thank the approximately 150 members of the leadership team and Division committees, under the direction of Program Chair April Franco and PDW Chair Jon Carr, and the roughly 800 reviewers who gave their valuable time to help put the program together.

Get involved!

Like other academic organizations, the ENT Division is run entirely by volunteers, and we can use your help. Getting involved is a great way not only to serve your fellow members, and the academic entrepreneurship community more generally, but also a way to build relationships and expand your professional network. We have openings on several committees and are always looking for volunteers. You can find a list of committees here. Contact me for more information.

Submit and review for 2022

Please continue to submit your best work for the 2022 Annual Meeting. Instructions and deadlines for PDW, symposia, awards, and paper sessions are included in the NewsBlast November issue and will be distributed on the usual channels. Please review the calls from Jon Carr (Program Chair) and Rachida Justo (PDW Chair) for paper, session, and PDW proposals. Ph.D. students who graduated or plan to graduate during the 2021 calendar year should consider submitting to the Heizer or National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) Dissertation Awards. April Franco (Chair-Elect) has announced details associated with those submissions on our website.

And please sign up to be a reviewer! Our submission numbers have grown rapidly in recent years and we aim to provide multiple high-quality reviews for each proposal, which requires a large and diverse body of reviewers.

In case you missed it

If you missed our virtual business meeting in August, let me briefly recap some highlights. First, we thanked outgoing officers, committee chairs, and Representatives-at-Large (Esra Melimi, Gry Alsos, John Mueller, Rachida Justo, Trent Williams, Norris Krueger, Charoltte Ren) and welcomed new ones: Rachida Justo (PDW Chair), Sophie Bacq (Awards Committee Chair), Yuliya Snihur (GDSC Committee Chair), Diana Hechavarria (Teaching Committee Chair), Maribel Guerrero (​ENT Division Treasurer), Sheryl Winston-Smith​ (Ad hoc Mentorship Committee Chair), Ken Grant​ (Practice-Scholar Committee​ Chair), Isabella Hatak​ and Sofia Johan as new RALs and Matt Wood and Trent Williams as returning RALs. Welcome to all. Delighted to have you on board. Outgoing Chair, Peter Klein, reported on a number of new initiatives that have been launched in response to our wanting to continue to build the ENT Division community, including the new organizational structure for the division (longer-term service and support roles, more effective use of Representatives at Large and volunteers), more integrated award and sponsorship arrangements​ and New strategic initiatives (including online research and teaching seminars, meet the scholar interview series, more mentoring opportunities and greater online engagement). 

We thanked our sponsors: Syracuse (Gold Sponsor); Nord University, Baylor, Stockholm School of Economics and Miami University (Silver Sponsors); and Texas Tech, the New England Journal of Entrepreneurship, Colorado State, NC State, the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy, QUT, Babson, and Jönköping (Bronze Sponsors).

We also recognized the following award winners (and heard prerecorded video greetings from many):

• Mentor Award: Michael A. Hitt
• Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award: Moren Lévesque and Shaker Zahra​
• Best Reviewer Awards:

Chadresh Baid​
Alexander Berman
Ben Bulmash​,
Devin Burnell*​
Andrea Caldwell Marquez​
Emilio Costales*​
Margo Enthoven
Shirah Eden Foy​
Ketan Madan Goswami*​
Dagmar Hattenberg*
Steal Ivanova​
Qiang Li​
Matthew McCaffrey​
Jeffrey E. McGee​
Shelby Meek*​
Samira Nazar*​
Roland Leonardo Pegram​
Hans Nikolas Rawhouser​
Ashley Yerves Roccapriore*​
Joseph Richard Schaefer*​
Benedikt David Christian Seigner*​
Seowon Joseph Shin*​
Nicola Anne Thomas*​
Maud Van Merrienboer*​
Jannis Von Nitzch*​
Magdalena Winkler*​
(NB *indicates student)

• Best Empirical Paper (sponsored by Kennesaw State University’s Coles College of Business): “Slack and Performance in Family Owned SMEs: An Agency Theory Perspective” Tommaso Minola, Massimo Baù, Phillip Sieger, Alfredo De Massis and Francesco Chirico
• Best Conceptual Paper: “Are the Futures Computable? Knightian Uncertainty & Artificial Intelligence” David Townsend and Richard Hunt
• Best Family Business Paper: “Families’ entrepreneurial heritage transfer improves organizational ambidexterity through succession” Rolf Wilmes, Leif Brändl and Andreas Kuckertz, 
• Best Social Entrepreneurship Paper: “The Liability of Gender: Examining Investment Gaps in Male- and Female-led nascent social ventures” Shu Yang, Romi Kher and Scott Newbert
• Heizer Best Doctoral Dissertation Award (sponsored by Heizer Capital & the family of Edgar “Ned” Heizer, Jr.): Jiaju (Justin) Yan, Baylor University

• NFIB Best Doctoral Dissertation (sponsored by the NFIB): Russell Browder, University of Oklahoma
• Foundational Paper Award: “The pervasive effects of family on entrepreneurship: Toward a family embeddedness perspective” (Journal of Business Venturing 2003) Howard Aldrich and Jennifer Jennings
• Helena Yli-Renko Research Impact Award (sponsored by the USC Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies): “Signalling in equity crowdfunding” (Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2015), Gerrit KC Ahlers, Douglas Cumming, Christina Günther and Denis Schweizer.
• Emerging Scholar Award: Alex Kier
• Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award (sponsored by Yeshiva University): “Entrepreneurial Strategy” Erin Scott, Joshua Gans and Scott Stern

We next recognized the incoming committee chairs for 2021-2022:

• Awards: Sophie Bacq
• Communications: Lou Marino
• Continuity: Peter Klein
• Event Logistics and Planning: Susan Young
• Global Scholar Development: Yuliya Snihur
• Historian: Franz Lohrke
• Membership: Annelore Huyghe
• Ad hoc Membership: Sheryl Wintson-Smith
• Nominating: Peter Klein
• Practitioner Scholar: Ken Grant
• Research: Jeff Pollack
• Teaching: Diana Hechavarria

And the chairs of the 2021 consortia:

• Doctoral Consortium: Marilyn Uy
• Early Career Consortium: Rob Mitchell
• Mid-Career Consortium: Maw-Der Foo
• Late-Career Consortium: Kim Eddleston and Roland Kidwell

Finally, we thanked Peter Klein for his outstanding service as 2020-2021 Division Chair!

Message from Immediate Past Division Chair

September 2021
by Peter Klein
ENT Immediate Past Division Chair

Thanks to all our members, officers, and volunteers for your fantastic efforts in 2020-21. What a year! Unlike last year’s sudden pivot to a virtual environment, we had a full year to get ready for the 2021 conference, and most of us are familiar with remote conferencing and networking. Thanks to our Program Chair April Franco and our PDW Chair Jon Carr for organizing a terrific program for Virtual AOM and to all of you who presented, discussed, attended, and networked.

What will AOM and the ENT Division look like going forward? Most of us are hoping for a return to a face-to-face conference in Seattle next summer. At the same time, we’ve developed new capabilities for remote interaction and collaboration. One of the Division’s goals over the past year and in the weeks to come has been to leverage these capabilities to deliver more value to you, the members, throughout the year. This includes continuing our virtual mentoring activities via the AOM Connect platform as well as our New Member Committee’s e-encounter program, enhancing our social media presence, and providing new content such as online seminars and workshops and a Meet the Scholar interview series. If you’re interested in volunteering to help with any of these efforts, please let one of us know!

Our 2021-22 Program Chair Jon Carr and PDW Chair Rachida Justo will be working hard to put on the best possible program for Seattle, including looking for ways to incorporate virtual pre- and post-conference elements that add value to the conference. Under the capable leadership of Division Chair Sarah Jack, Chair-Elect April Franco, and the rest of the team, the Division is in great shape!

Message from the Program Chair

May 2021
by April Franco
Program Chair

Dear Reviewers,

Thank you for all your help and support with the reviewing process this year. Putting together the Annual Meeting program would be impossible without the contributions of our excellent reviewers. In 2021, we received a total of 682 finalised paper and symposium submissions. This is an incredible number of submissions, especially given the unusual circumstances of the past year! We worked hard to ensure that the majority of submissions were assigned three reviewers. 

However, this was a remarkably difficult year for everyone, with additional childcare or work demands and healthcare issues. Additionally, as the deadline approached, several reviewers lost power and water due to unusual weather conditions. I deeply appreciate everyone who tried to finish reviews under such difficult circumstances, as well as those reviewers who stepped up when it became clear we needed more help. Overall, we had 1772 reviews submitted, which meant that an average submission received 2.6 reviews. This is a true accomplishment during these very complicated times!

Our members have always been key in helping our Division grow and develop entrepreneurship scholars. The high number of reviews is a testament to your commitment to supporting fellow entrepreneurship scholars. Thank you for providing such thoughtful reviews. Good reviews can be time consuming, particularly when other time demands are incredibly high. Your help and support are appreciated. We simply could not do this without you.

Thank you again! I look forward to seeing you in August.

Best,
April

Highlights from the 2021 Virtual Mid-winter Meeting of Entrepreneurship Division’s Leadership

February 27, 2021
by Diane M. Sullivan
ENT Division Secretary

The 2021 Mid-winter Meeting of the Entrepreneurship Division was hosted this January by the Entrepreneurship Division Chair, Peter Klein of Baylor University. For the first time in Division history, the Mid-winter Meeting was held in a completely remote format.

Participating in this year’s Mid-winter Meeting were members of the Entrepreneurship Division’s leadership spanning the globe from Canada, Denmark, France, Norway, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

Throughout the meeting, the leadership focused on planning the Division’s activities and events for 2021 virtual Academy of Management Conference including, in part, planning high-quality virtual consortia events and considering enriching online social experiences for Division members.

A number of special topics were emphasized at this year’s meeting. Notable special topics centered on the revision of the Division’s Domain Statement, Division Policy Manual revisions, and fundraising in the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world.

Other topics that received attention at the 2021 Mid-winter Meeting included: 1) preparations associated with the Division’s upcoming 5-year review, 2) ways to provide enhanced value to the membership year-round, and 3) the continuation of the Division’s mentorship program.

Despite its unusual modality, the 2021 Entrepreneurship Division Mid-winter Meeting was a productive event for the Division’s leadership, all of whom thank Division Chair, Peter Klein, for organizing and hosting the event, and for ensuring it ran smoothly.

The AOM Entrepreneurship Division's Financial Position in the COVID-19 Era

January 9, 2021
by Maribel Guerrero
ENT Division Treasurer

When I assumed the AOM Entrepreneurship (ENT) Division Treasurer in 2019, the role represented a great honour as well as a pleasing opportunity to serve our Division with the responsibility to continue the great work of previous treasurers.   

In my first NewsBlast in 2019, we looked back into the financial statements from 2012 to 2018 to understand the financial position of our Division. Additionally, we recognised our sponsors (mostly universities, foundations, and publishers) and their invaluable contributions. Moreover, we focused and emphasized on two key operating expenses for our Division, namely – 1) Social events (for engaging doctoral, early career, mid-career, and late-career consortiums), and 2) Awards (for recognising the excellence, advances, and contributions in our research community). I am happy to share that despite increasing our investments in these crucial expense items, we continued to maintain a healthy balance sheet. 

In my second NewsBlast in 2020, we expressed our gratitude to the 2019 ENT Division sponsors' contributions that allowed the participation of 40 Ph.D. students from diverse countries in the Doctoral Consortium (i.e., five students more than in 2018). Additionally, we continued to invest in reward and recognition of research excellence through 12 awards! Furthermore, we invested in numerous other engagement initiatives including organizing meetings with Journal Editors as well as social/ networking opportunities for the doctoral consortium, early-career consortia, mid-career consortia and late-career consortia participants. However, we continued to be cognizant of the need for fiscal sustainability going forward. 

For my third NewsBlast for 2021, as we all know, 2020 surprised us with an unexpected event, "the worldwide health pandemic"! The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all of us in many ways. A positive view of this external shock has been the emergence of a creative destruction effect on AOM's conference activities. Financial issues were no exception. Although the 2020 AOM Annual Meeting's virtual edition helped momentarily to diminish one of the main operating expenses (social and networking events), we introduced several financial adjustments in these uncertain times. We are very grateful for our 2020 sponsors' vibrant efforts, our members' entrepreneurial spirit, and the vital financial support from the AOM. The rapid and disruptive response of these ENT Division collectives made it possible to achieve the 2020 ENT Division goals (i.e., Doctoral Consortium, PDW sessions, Paper sessions, Awards recognitions) as well as introduce new initiatives (i.e., ENT-Encounters mentorships, Symposiums)! 

In the face of current challenges, the Entrepreneurship Division Executive Committee has been working together over the year in multiple entrepreneurial initiatives and innovative strategies "to sustain our goals while remaining financially sound". In this continuous learning process, we are convinced that together, we will support the ENT division's post-pandemic challenges and financial shape to be ready for the new decade's goals, projects, opportunities…. We hope to see you face to face soon… 

All the best for the new entrepreneurial year and stay safe!



Message from Division Chair

November 18, 2020
by Peter Klein
ENT Division Chair

What an honor and pleasure to serve as Chair of the Entrepreneurship Division! We are now the fourth largest Division in the Academy of Management with 3,724 members. More than a quarter our members are students, indicating a growing field. The academic field of entrepreneurship continues to thrive with exciting developments in research, teaching, and outreach, and the ENT Division aims to be at the center. Whether your primary interests are concepts and theory, quantitative or qualitative empirical work, education, consulting, public policy, or journalism, the Division has a place for you. The field has grown beyond its origins in small-business management and the startup process to include micro and macro approaches to issues such as creativity, judgment, and decision-making; innovation, industry evolution, and economic growth; entrepreneurial finance, law, and public administration; technological, social, and cultural effects of entrepreneurship; and so much more. We’re glad to have you with us!

This year has been a challenge for all of us, personally and professionally. I want to thank each of you for making the 2020 virtual conference a success. As entrepreneurship scholars, we know a lot about radical uncertainty, sudden environmental shifts, experimentation and learning, and adapting to unexpected change – skills that have come in handy in 2020! Despite many zigs and zags, our program went off without a hitch (okay, maybe just a few hitches). Our plenary, paper, panel, consortium, and PDW sessions were well attended via the Academy’s new platform and its Zoom extensions. Of course, none of this would have happened without the dedicated efforts of our Executive Committee, consortium chairs, and volunteers. In a normal year, putting together the Annual Meeting is a huge undertaking. Now imagine dealing with a last-minute pivot to a completely new format!

I especially want to thank the approximately 150 members of the leadership team and Division committees, under the direction of Program Chair Sarah Jack and PDW Chair April Franco, and the roughly 800 reviewers who gave up their valuable time to help put the program together.

The year ahead

As you’ve probably heard, the 2021 Annual Meeting will be virtual as well. The exact format is yet to be determined but it will most likely include a mix of synchronous and asynchronous sessions and activities, spread out over a longer period than the usual 5-day period. We will be sharing more information on this throughout the year.

Moreover, we are working on ways to provide value to members throughout the year, beyond the Annual Meeting, including virtual workshops and seminars, teaching materials, new media channels and a bolder presence on social media, and more. One new program is E-Encounters, a mentoring program matching junior and senior scholars for one-on-one meetings to discuss research, careers, and other professional issues. More than 60 senior scholars signed up for our first round of mentoring sessions, which are already taking place – and we will do it again in the coming months. (Contact Annelore Huyge for more information.)

Get involved!

Like other academic organizations, the ENT Division is run entirely by volunteers, and we can use your help. Getting involved is a great way not only to serve your fellow members, and the academic entrepreneurship community more generally, but also a way to build relationships and expand your professional network. We have openings on several committees and are always looking for volunteers. You can find a list of committees here. Contact me for more information.

Submit and review for 2021

Please submit your best work for the 2021 Annual Meeting! Instructions and deadlines for PDW, symposia, awards, and paper sessions are included in the NewsBlast November issue and will be distributed on the usual channels. Please review the calls from April Franco (Program Chair) and Jon Carr (PDW Chair) for paper, session, and PDW proposals. Ph.D. students who graduated or plan to graduate during the 2020 calendar year should consider submitting to the Heizer or National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) Dissertation Awards. Sarah Jack (Chair-Elect) has announced details associated with those submissions on our website.

And please sign up to be a reviewer! Our submission numbers have grown rapidly in recent years and we aim to provide multiple high-quality reviews for each proposal, which requires a large and diverse body of reviewers.

In case you missed it

If you missed our virtual business meeting in August, let me briefly recap some highlights. First, we thanked outgoing officers, committee chairs, and Representatives-at-Large (Mirjam Knockaert, Jill Kickul, Gry Alsos, Don Siegel, and Martie-Louise Verreynne) and welcomed new ones: Jon Carr (PDW Chair), Jeff Pollack (Research Committee Chair), Annelore Huyghe (Membership Committee Chair), Raja Roy (Parliamentarian), Lou Marino (Communications Committee Chair), and Sophie Bacq, Jeff Pollack, Sheryl Winston-Smith, and Matt Wood (RALs). Outgoing Chair, Dawn DeTienne, reported on a membership survey conducted before the 2020 meeting about preferences and concerns on the virtual format and reviewed several Division activities including our mentoring program.

We thanked our sponsors: Syracuse (Gold Sponsor); Baylor, Stockholm School of Economics and Miami-Ohio (Silver Sponsors); and Texas Tech, the New England Journal of Entrepreneurship, Colorado State, NC State, the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy, QUT, Babson, and Jönköping (Bronze Sponsors).

We also recognized the following award winners (and heard prerecorded video greetings from many):

• Mentor Award: Lowell W. Busenitz
• Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award: Norris Krueger
• Best Reviewer Awards: Olubukunola Akinsanmi, Chandresh Baid, Brian Jame Bergman, Ilija Braun, Danny Chung, Yuval Engel, Ramzi Fathallah, Dagmar Hattenberg, Richard Hunt, Kris Irwin, Trevor Lyle Israelsen, Luis Jimenez Castillo, Felix  Kaysers, Joyce Kox, Todor Lohwasser, Aaron McKenny, Melissa R. Medaugh, Jonathan Preedom, Kristen Raney, Reiner Schaefer, Barbara Schmidt, Mihwa Seong, Raj Krishnan Shankar, James C. Spee, Muhammad Sufyan, Maud Van Merrienboer, Eva Weissenboeck, Pavel Ivanov Zhelyazkov
• Best Empirical Paper (sponsored by Kennesaw State University’s Coles College of Business): “New Venture Creation and the Development of Entrepreneurial Cognition: A Longitudinal Analysis of Startup Diaries” by Gabi Anja Kafka, Raja Singaram, and Jeroen Kraaijenbrink
• Best Conceptual Paper: “Opaque Costly Signals and Debt Contracts in Entrepreneurial Ventures” by Lee Grumbles, Duygu Phillips, and Matthew Rutherford
• Best Social Entrepreneurship Paper: “Organizing for Hybridity: The Role of Self-Interest Motivations in Social Venture Creation” by Alexandra Mittermaier and Holger Patzelt
• Heizer Best Doctoral Dissertation Award (sponsored by Heizer Capital & the family of Edgar “Ned” Heizer, Jr.): Laura Lecluyse, Ghent University
• NFIB Best Doctoral Dissertation (sponsored by the NFIB): Theodor Lucian Vladasel, Copenhagen Business School
• Foundational Paper Award: “Creating something from nothing: Resource construction through entrepreneurial bricolage” (ASQ, 2005), by Ted Baker and Reed Nelson
• Greif Research Impact Award (sponsored by the USC Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies): “The dynamics of crowdfunding: An exploratory study” (JBV, 2014), by Ethan Mollick
• Emerging Scholar Awards: Rob Nason and Dana Kanze
• Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award (sponsored by Yeshiva University): “Accelerator Rap” developed by Betsy Campbell

We next recognized the incoming committee chairs for 2020-2021:

• Awards: Trent Williams
• Communications: Lou Marino
• Continuity: Dawn DeTienne
• Event Logistics and Planning: Susan Young
• Global Scholar Development: Esra Memili
• Historian: Franz Lohrke
• Membership: Annelore Huyghe
• Nominating: Dawn DeTienne
• Practitioner Scholar: John Mueller
• Research: Jeff Pollack
• Teaching: Rachida Justo

And the chairs of the 2021 consortia:

• Doctoral Consortium: Marilyn Uy
• Early Career Consortium: Rob Mitchell
• Mid-Career Consortium: Maw-Der Foo
• Late-Career Consortium: Kim Eddleston and Roland Kidwell

Finally, we thanked Dawn DeTienne for her outstanding service as 2019-20 Division Chair!

Message from Immediate Past Division Chair

September 3, 2020
by Dawn DeTienne
ENT Immediate Past Division Chair

A big “thank you” to all of you for supporting my role as Division Chair during the past year. I hope you were able to engage in the variety of activities during the Annual Meeting.

As I mentioned at this year’s division meeting, your responses to my requests for insights regarding the Annual Meeting were simply unbelievable. That so many of you would respond with excellent feedback during such a crazy time indicated to me your willingness to serve and your belief in the Division! I had this idea that I would respond to each and every one of you, but alas I did not, so this is my group thank you. I used your feedback to make a case for the ENT Division in the annual meeting and to strongly request AOM reduce the fee for the conference. In the latter, we didn’t win! But your willingness to participate made my job easier. For your “enjoyment” here is a very small sampling of parts of the over 250 messages you sent me.

I want to remind you of the mentoring and mentee opportunities afforded through our mentoring platform at https://connect.aom.org/home. We currently have over 100 mentors who have agreed to mentor 1 to 3 students. But with over 900 students, we could definitely use more. I think it is a lot of fun! 

Please know that the Division is in very capable hands as Peter Klein (Division Chair), Sarah Jack (Chair Elect), April Franco (Program Chair) and Jon Carr (PDW Chair) fill the leadership roles this next year. Please support them in the way you have done for me.

Cheers!

Dawn

Introducing the New Members of Our Executive Committee

July 2020
by Donald O. Neubaum
ENT Past Division Chair

This past May, the membership of the Entrepreneurship Division elected five new members to the Executive Committee. Four of these individuals were elected to the vacant Representatives at Large (RAL) positions, while one was elected to serve as the incoming Professional Development Workshop (PDW) Chair. Please allow me to briefly introduce each of these new Executive Committee members.

Jon C. Carr, the Jenkins Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at North Carolina State University, will become the Division’s next PDW Chair. Jon has been an active member of the Division for many years, serving as a reviewer, session chair, and PDW presenter.  From 2004 to 2009, he served as Chair of the Division’s Membership Committee. In that role, he developed the first online membership survey for the Division as part of its 5-year Academy of Management Division Review. He has also served on the Board of Reviewers for the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference.  Currently he is an Associate Editor of Family Business Review (FBR) and an active review board member with the Journal of Business Venturing (JBV) and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice (ETP). Jon will serve on the Executive Committee for five years, then transition from PDW Chair to become the Division’s Program Chair, Chair-Elect, Chair, and Past Chair in subsequent years.

Sophie Bacq, Denis A. Grégoire, Jeff Pollack, and Sheryl Winston Smith were all elected to vacant RAL positions and will serve three-year terms. Sophie is an Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and has been an active member of the Division since 2011. In that time, she has been involved in over 25 presentations and PDWs. Sophie has served on the Division’s Research Committee since 2019 and has mentored several Ph.D. students. She is a Field Editor at JBV, an Associate Editor at the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, and serves on the Editorial Review Board at ETP. With Jill Kickul, Sophie also co-directs The Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference.

Denis is the Rogers-J.A.-Bombardier Chair of Entrepreneurship Research and Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at HEC Montréal, Canada. As a member of the Division since the beginning of his doctoral studies, Denis has contributed to several AOM conferences (for the ENT, BPS, MOC and RM divisions) as a reviewer, presenter, panelist, organizer of panels and PDWs, and presenter at doctoral consortia. He has also served on the Research Committee and served as a judge for the Heizer Dissertation Award. Denis is an Associate Editor for Academy of Management Journal and serves on several Editorial Review Boards, including of Academy of Management Discoveries, ETP, JBV, and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. This will be his second term as an RAL, previously serving from 2017 to 2020.

Jeff is an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management. He currently serves the Division in multiple capacities, including acting as Co-chair of the Entrepreneurship Division’s Research Committee and serving as the Moderator of the Division’s Listserv (ENTREP) since 2015. Jeff is an Editor at ETP and an Associate Editor at Journal of Business Venturing Insights. He also serves on the Editorial Review Board of multiple journals, including Academy of Management Perspectives, JBV, FBR, and Journal of Management Studies.

Sheryl is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy (with tenure) and Associate Dean for the Master of Science program in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at BI Norwegian Business School.  She has served on the Division’s Research Committee. Sheryl is also very active in the Strategic Management Society, where she currently serves as the Engagement Officer in the Knowledge & Innovation Interest Group.  Previously, she served a 2-year term as a RAL in the Knowledge and Innovation Interest Group and was Track Chair of the Knowledge & Innovation track for the Banff Special Conference in 2017. Sheryl also serves on the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of International Business Studies.

Please welcome the Division’s newly elected Executive Committee Members!

Donald O. Neubaum
ENT Past Division Chair


A Message from the Division Chair

May 2020
by Dawn DeTienne, ENT Division Chair

Hello ENT Division Members,

I want to thank all of you who provided feedback regarding this year’s AOM. It was my intention to respond to each of you, but as the number reached over 225 responses, that became much more difficult. But please know that we appreciate you!

This message is to update you on the most recent information I have regarding the upcoming AOM Meeting, which was to be held in Vancouver. As you know, we will not be holding a face-to-face meeting this year, but I believe we can still connect with each other, get feedback on our work, meet new people, and develop our scholarship. This morning I joined a Zoom call with leadership and want to share with you the basic outline of how things will work and then some additional detail about the ENT Division.

Date and Timing of Synchronous and Asynchronous Sessions

The virtual conference will be held from the kick-off on August 6 through August 11 and consist of both synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Some sessions will be available for a longer period of time (30 days?). AOM is centrally coordinating the event through a platform that seems to be part of the Zoom interface. This platform will give us flexibility and should work better than you may have experienced in the past with Zoom. 

Approximately 10% of the program will be held synchronously. The selection of these sessions will be based upon those that received the highest ratings from conference reviewers. As PDW and Program Chairs, Sarah Jack and April Franco will be called upon to do the bulk of the work (thanks so very much to both of you!) and make those recommendations to AOM. We have some flexibility, so we can add sessions if it makes sense to do so. The sessions will be recorded for viewing asynchronously for a limited period. It is unclear to me when you will know if your submission is part of the synchronous sessions.

There will be three blocks of time beginning at 6am EDT and ending at 10pm EDT (6-10am, 12-4pm, and 7-10pm). While this is not optimal for everyone, I think the 16-hour window allows participants to attend at least some of the sessions. A 6am session will be the middle of the night for me!

Many sessions will be asynchronous and have pre-recorded elements. However, they will be made available for online interaction, such as forums and discussion chats. Authors will have the opportunity to opt-in and pre-record a 5-minute video of their papers.

What Sessions Will We Have?

We are currently planning to hold (in formats not completely decided) the Doctoral and Early Career Consortia, the New Member Meeting Point, and other regular events. The consortia deadlines are coming up, so please remember to sign up!

Volunteers

WE WILL NEED VOLUNTEERS to "chair" digital sessions, both live and asynchronous. These volunteers will be our ambassadors for the new format, and I hope that some of you will step up to bring enthusiasm and innovation to help guide and encourage people who may have concerns about a virtual conference. These requests will come soon.

Fees

There will be a fee for attending the virtual conference (currently planned at USD200 for academic members and USD100 for students, but not yet set in stone). This fee allows you to formally register and gain access to the entire conference, papers, presentations, sessions (live and asynchronous), meetings, and so on.

Even though none of us wanted to be at this point, I believe we will learn a lot through this experience. There are some very positive aspects, including the ability for people to attend who have never had the funding or ability to travel, a reduction in our carbon footprint, an opportunity to attend additional sessions because we can view these later, and a lower cost at a time when many institutions are dramatically cutting expenses. Plus, by forcing us to add virtual options, we may see a much more innovative AOM in the future!

I will be back in touch as soon as I have more details.

Warm regards,
Dawn DeTienne

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Division Highlights from the 2020 Mid-winter Meeting of Entrepreneurship Division’s Leadership

February 2020
by Diane M. Sullivan, Division Secretary

The 2020 Mid-winter Meeting of the Entrepreneurship Division was hosted this January by the Entrepreneurship Division Chair, Dawn DeTienne, at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Participating in this year’s Mid-winter Meeting were members of the Entrepreneurship Division’s leadership spanning the globe from Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

Throughout the meeting, the leadership focused on planning the Division’s activities and events for 2020 Academy of Management Conference including, in part, planning the Division consortia and social events.

A number of special topics were emphasized at this year’s meeting. One notable special topic centered on the establishment of Division’s Sponsorship committee. The purpose of the Sponsorship committee is to provide consistent and ongoing management and engagement with Division sponsors. Division sponsors are critical to allowing the Division to pursue and achieve Division goals and, especially, to continue delivering substantive value to the membership.

Other topics that received special attention at the 2020 Mid-winter Meeting included: 1) activities associated with the upcoming Division 5-year review including a review of the Division by-laws and Domain Statement, 2) ways to improve the number of nominations received for Division awards, and 3) ensuring inclusion in Division consortia participation.

The 2020 Entrepreneurship Division Mid-winter Meeting was a productive and fun event for the Division’s leadership, all of whom thank Division Chair, Dawn DeTienne and everyone at Colorado State University for hosting this important annual meeting.

Message from the Division Chair

October 2019
by Dawn DeTienne

Thanks so much for trusting me to be Chair of this amazing division!  Entrepreneurship is a dynamic and inclusive division and I truly believe all of you to be the most intellectual, engaging, innovative, and fun people I have worked with. Because the Entrepreneurship Division grew by nearly 200 members last year (accounting for 42 percent of the growth in the Academy), I think the secret is out!  I am humbled and privileged to be able to serve as your chair.  I love this division because we are diverse in so many ways. Our members not only come from entrepreneurship schools, but many come from sociology, economics, psychology, strategy, finance, and many are entrepreneurs. This brings a diversity of thought that provides the foundation for our innovative perspectives and approaches. Additionally, more than half of our members come from outside of the United States and 60% of the division leadership track is female. Thirty percent of all AOM members from Africa choose our division and of our nearly 3900 members, 25% are PhD students. Despite all this, we acknowledge there is much more to do.

First, I want to thank the approximately 150 people who serve on the leadership team and division committees as well as the approximately 800 of you who reviewed manuscripts for the annual meeting, served as session chairs, and evaluated division and dissertation awards. It takes many volunteer hours to make it all happen!  Because of our goal to reach all members, we engage in many areas of outreach including our Emerging Scholars Program, Global Scholar Development (headed by Esra Melimi), Practitioner-Scholar Outreach (John Mueller), Teaching Committee (Rachida Justo), Doctoral (Marilyn Uy and Michael Gielnik), Early-career (Desiree Pacheco), Mid-career (Rachida Justo), and Late-career (Kim Eddleston) Consortia. Even though we have many volunteers, WE NEED YOU!  Here are some of the ways to engage:

REVIEW!

Last year we were short on reviewers for the annual meeting.  In order to manage the growing number of manuscripts the Division receives for consideration at the Annual Conference, we need over 1,500 reviewers. Last year we had just over 1300, which required some individuals to review many manuscripts.  Please respond to the Calls for Reviewers.  If you submit a PDW, symposia, or paper for the annual meeting, you should volunteer to review. Doing so is a critical step towards discovery. Please be a good professional citizen and register to review and advance the scholarship in our Division through thoughtful, developmental reviews.

MENTOR!

We are looking for scholars who will consider mentoring our PhD students.  We are currently looking for junior or senior scholars who would like to give back to the field by serving as a mentor.  It’s easy and rewarding.  To sign up, please go to https://connect.aom.org/home  and follow the directions. The Entrepreneurship Division is the only division currently engaged in Mentor Match and we are thrilled to be able to offer these resources.  Watch for more details! 

VOLUNTEER!

There are a few opportunities to become more involved with the Division. The Awards, Communication, Practitioner Scholar, and Research Committees are looking for volunteers. If you are interested, please send an email expressing your interest to dawn.detienne@colostate.edu. 

SUBMIT!

Announcements regarding deadlines for the PDW, symposia, awards, and paper sessions for the Annual meeting are soon to follow. Watch for calls from Sarah Jack (Program Chair) and April Franco (PDW Chair) regarding these activities on the program. Ph.D. students who graduated or plan to graduate within the 2019 calendar year are especially encouraged to submit their dissertation for either the Heizer or National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) Dissertation Awards. Peter Klein (Chair-Elect) will be announcing those details soon.

Finally, I would like to extend a warm, personal thanks to those colleagues who have been instrumental in the development and growth of our Division. The Division is where it is today because of your generous, tireless effort. Thanks to past chairs and especially Don Neubaum and Christina Guenther for mentoring me through this process.  Special thanks to Don for his leadership in 2019!  Thanks in advance to Diane Sullivan, Division Secretary, who I am sure will be extremely busy keeping me organized this coming year. I look forward to hosting our Executive Committee team at the Mid-Winter meeting in Fort Collins, Colorado in January where we will continue to plan a path of excellence for this Division.

 Below is a summary of the accomplishments, awards, and celebrations, from 2019

• New Committee Chairs and RALs include: Trent Williams (Awards Committee), Diane Sullivan (Secretary), Raja Roy (Parliamentarian), Frédéric Delmar (RAL), Tim Holcomb (RAL), Annelore Huyghe (RAL), Yuliya Snihur (RAL), and April Franco (PDW Chair).
• Don Neubaum took on his role as Past-Chair. Thanks Don for all your work these past four years!
• Our mentoring program is open to all doctoral students. Thanks Gry Alsos.
• We created a new consortium (previously a PDW) focused on Late Careers. Thanks Jerry Katz for your efforts to make this happen.  
• Twenty-five people received the 2019 Annual Meeting Reviewer Awards (sponsored by Journal of Small Business Management) and 11 were PhD students
• Ben Spigel and Tara Vinodrai won Best Empirical Paper Award (sponsored by Kennesaw State University Coles College of Business) for work on Recycling in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
• Nonyelum Lina Eze, Georges Samara, and Maria Jose Parada won Best Family Business Paper (sponsored by Kennesaw State University Cox Family Enterprise Center) for work on Cross-Regional Differences in Entrepreneurial Capital of Family Firms
• David Townsend and Richard Hunt won Best Conceptual Paper (sponsored by Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice) for work on Entrepreneurship’s False Dichotomization of Risk and Uncertainty through Modal Logics
• Jiawei Sophia Fu won Best Social Entrepreneurship Paper (sponsored by Batten Institute, Darden School) for work on Institutional Complexity in Social Ventures.
• Cheng Gao won the Heizer Best Doctoral Dissertation (sponsored by Heizer Capital & the Edgar “Ned” Heizer Family) for work on Strategy and Entrepreneurship in Nascent Industries
• Eliana Crosina won the NFIB Best Doctoral Dissertation (sponsored by NFIB) for work on Becoming an Entrepreneur in a Shared Work Space
• The Foundational Paper Award, which honors a paper that has powerfully changed the conversation in the field of entrepreneurship for at least a decade, was award to Sharon Alvarez and Jay Barney for Discovery and Creation: Alternative Theories of Entrepreneurial Action.
• The Grief Research Impact Award (sponsored by USC Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies), was awarded to Bruce Martin, Jeff McNally, and Michael Kay for Formation of Human Capital in Entrepreneurship: A Meta-analysis of Entrepreneurship Education Outcomes.
• The three Emerging Scholars Awards, which honor a record of scholarship that has the potential to make innovative and impactful contributions to entrepreneurship research (sponsored by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation), was awarded to Sophie Bacq, Trent Williams, and Eric Zhao.

I am looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible at the Annual Meeting in Vancouver in August 2020.

Meet the New Elects

July 2019
by Donald Neubaum

The Entrepreneurship Division recently elected five people to the Executive Committee. Four new Representatives at Large (RALs) were elected to serve three-year terms, which will commence at the conclusion of the upcoming Annual Meeting. Three of these positions replace RALs who are rolling off the Executive Committee after fulfilling their three-year term, while the fourth is a new RAL position earned by the Division due to an increase in membership. RALs represent the general membership in the Division’s activities and report to the Division Chair. Their duties include serving as committee members or committee chairs, fulfilling formal ambassadorial duties on behalf of the Division, and performing other duties as assigned by the Chair. They are critically important because they contribute to the Division’s planning efforts and are often relied upon to spearhead the Division’s key initiatives and activities.

In addition to the RALs, a new Professional Development Workshop Chair (PWD or Assistant Program Chair) was elected. The PDW Chair is a five-year position. In successive years, this person will serve as PDW Chair, Program Chair, Chair Elect, Chair, and Immediate Past Chair.   

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who voted in the election and thank all who volunteered to run for an Executive Committee position. We are a volunteer organization and could not function without the help of the many members who choose to serve the Division. I look forward to working with each of the newly elected officials in the coming months. Below, I would like to briefly introduce each of them to the Division. 

Incoming PDW Chair - April Franco, University of Toronto 

April has been an active member of the Entrepreneurship Division, serving as a Representative at Large since 2016 and chair of the Awards Committee. Her research interests include entrepreneurship via spin-outs (firms started by former employees of incumbent firms) and start-up teams. April has published articles focused on entrepreneurship in various journals (e.g., Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy) and contributed a chapter in the Handbook of Entrepreneurship. She was an associate editor for Management Science, and she currently serves on the editorial board for Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. Additionally, April has received many awards and grants for her research, including Best Paper Award from the Academy of Management Journal in 2005. April is passionate about entrepreneurship research and has been mentoring both graduate students and junior faculty for several programs, including the Kauffman fellowship awards and the Entrepreneurship Division’s mentoring program. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

 

Representative at Large - Frédéric Delmar, emlyon business school

Frédéric is a professor of entrepreneurship and head of the research center in entrepreneurship and innovation at emlyon business school. He is also a visiting professor in entrepreneurship at the Sten K. Johnson Centre for Entrepreneurship at Lund University School of Economics and Management, Sweden. Prior to his current appointments, Frédéric held other positions at Lund University, Sweden; Stockholm School of Economics and Stockholm University, Sweden. 

Frédéric has been researching entrepreneurship for twenty years. His main research interests include the early development and growth of new ventures, including current research focused on new venture team dynamics. Frédéric’s work has been published in books and numerous journals, including Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and Technovation. He is associate editor for Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and former senior editor for Organization Studies. He is also a member of the editorial board of Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, and Strategic Organization. Frédéric has also been active in several start-ups.
 

Representative at Large - Tim R. Holcomb, Miami University 

Tim is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Farmer School of Business at Miami University and serves as Director of the John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship. Previously, he held the Jim Moran Professor of Entrepreneurship at Florida State University, where he served as Executive Director of The Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship. Tim earned his Ph.D. in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship from Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. 

Tim has 85 refereed publications, including eight articles published in FT50 journals. His work has earned best paper awards from the Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, Kauffman Foundation, and Babson College. Tim is co-editor of Kauffman Foundation’s State of the Field: Entrepreneurial Strategy and serves on editorial boards for three FT50 journals: Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, and Journal of Management. He is a member of the Board of Reviewers for Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference and holds or previously held key leadership positions in the 21,000+ member AOM, including the Executive Committee (elected) of STR Division and Research Committees of ENT Division and OMT Division.

 

Representative at Large - Annelore Huyghe, Cass Business School

Annelore is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Entrepreneurship at Cass Business School, United Kingdom. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Ghent University, Belgium. Before joining Cass, Annelore worked as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research. Her research interests include consequences of passion in entrepreneurship (e.g., for individual and team well-being), role and identity dynamics in collective action (e.g., in new venture teams and market categories), and drivers and processes of research commercialization. 

Annelore’s work has been published in leading journals in her field, including Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, and Small Business Economics. She has received several awards, such as Best Paper Award at ACERE Conference 2015 and Distinguished Reviewer Award from the AOM Entrepreneurship Division in 2014. She currently teaches courses in entrepreneurship and innovation at graduate and MBA level and serves in the Membership Committee of the AOM Entrepreneurship Division. Annelore consults for several tech start-ups and often organizes entrepreneurship events to bring together academics and practitioners.

 

Representative at Large - Yuliya Snihur, Toulouse Business School 

Yuliya is an Associate Professor of Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation at the Toulouse Business School in France. Yuliya teaches and studies strategy-formation processes in new ventures based on the analysis of organizational business models, identities, and imprinting. She is researching the role of time and language in entrepreneurship based on complexity theory, cognitive, and linguistic approaches such as framing. To this end, she uses hand-collected interview data, fieldwork, and extensive longitudinal datasets to build theory. 

Yuliya has published in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and Entrepreneurship & Regional Development. She was the finalist for the 2018 AOM Organization and Management Theory Division’s Best Entrepreneurship Paper Award and received the 2014 Heizer Dissertation Award from the AOM Entrepreneurship Division. Yuliya co-edited a Special Issue on business models and sustainability for the Journal of Cleaner Production. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of Long Range Planning. Yuliya received her Ph.D. in management ffrom the IESE Business School (Barcelona, Spain), prior to which she worked in corporate finance.

Message from the Program Chair

May 2019
by Peter G. Klein

We’re on track for a great Entrepreneurship program in Boston! This year we received a record 976 submissions for the scholarly program (919 paper proposals and 57 symposium proposals). Based on the time units allocated to us by AOM, we were able to accept 420 papers for traditional paper sessions, 42 papers for discussion sessions, and 57 symposia, for an overall acceptance rate of 53%. Entrepreneurship Division sessions will be held in the Boston Marriott Copley Place.

Thanks to all for your hard work in putting proposals together, and congratulations to those of you who had your submissions accepted. Our Division members are doing fascinating work on a variety of topics, using many different methods, and in several unique contexts; I regret that we were unable to accept more submissions.

What makes the difference between an accepted and rejected proposal? As with any scholarly output, the best papers are clearly written and organized, address an important research question, are well positioned within the literature, explain carefully what has been done and what remains to be done, and invite a conversation among session participants. Symposium proposals are similar but address broader themes, emphasize relationships among the presenter’s topics, backgrounds, and approaches, and are likely to engage the interest of entrepreneurship scholars (as well as scholars from other Divisions).

Of course, the review process (especially at this scale) is imperfect. As much as possible, we match proposals to reviewers by keywords—so choose them carefully! We try to pool experienced and less experienced reviewers and have some variety of backgrounds and experiences, within the constraints established by the keyword matches. If you haven’t already done so, please be sure to rate your reviewers—reviewing is hard work, and it would be impossible to put together such a large program without the conscientious efforts of our excellent reviewer pool.

Speaking of reviews: Nearly all volunteer reviewers provided useful and timely feedback, but a few did not make the deadlines. Some reviewers also didn’t provide feedback to the authors. Keep in mind that the authors are counting on you not only for developmental feedback, but also for your ratings that determine which proposals are ultimately accepted.

Thanks again for all you do to make the Entrepreneurship Division great. I look forward to seeing you in Boston!

A Very Productive 2019 Mid-winter Meeting for the Entrepreneurship Division’s Leadership
                                                                                         March 18, 2019
The 2019 Mid-winter Meeting of the Entrepreneurship Division was hosted this January by the Entrepreneurship Division Chair, Donald Neubaum, at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Participating in this year’s Mid-winter Meeting were members of the Entrepreneurship Division’s leadership spanning the globe from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

Throughout the meeting, the leadership focused on planning the Division’s activities and events for 2019 Academy of Management Conference including, in part, planning the Division consortia and social events.

A number of special topics were also discussed at this year’s meeting. One notable special topic centered on the Division’s new mentorship program. The purpose of the mentorship program is to provide early-stage scholars an opportunity to develop mentor relationships with more seasoned members of the Division. In 2018, a pilot version of the mentorship program was launched, in part, due to the efforts of the Division RAL, Gry Alsos, from Nord University, who is chairing the Division’s mentorship program efforts. In 2019, the mentorship program will expand for additional members to participate.

Other topics that received special attention at the 2019 Mid-winter Meeting included: 1) ensuring the program continues to offer content that serves the broad interests of our members (e.g., members at different stages of their careers, practitioner-scholars, global scholar development, new members, etc.), 2) planning and coordinating activities associated with the 2022 five-year Division review, 3) sponsorship management, and 4) best practices for effectively engaging conference reviewers. 

The 2019 Entrepreneurship Division Mid-winter Meeting was a productive and fun event for the Division’s leadership, all of whom thank Division Chair, Donald Neubaum, as well as Barbara Foster and everyone at Florida Atlantic University for hosting this important annual meeting.

Diane M. Sullivan
ENT Division Secretary

Looking Back to Look Forward

January 14, 2019

With great honor, I assumed the ENT Division Treasurer position for the next 3-years term. It is a pleasing opportunity to serve our division as well as the responsibility to continue the great work of my predecessor, Dr. Marcos Hashimoto.

As a part of my introduction, I was looking back at the statements from 2012 to 2018 (Oct) to understand the financial position of our Division. In this review, we observe that the annual available funds are composed by the generous annual allocation from the AOM, the contributions from sponsorship (mostly universities, foundations and publishers), and others (balance forward from the previous year, annual meeting attendances, etc.). Particularly, we identify two interesting trends in the annual available funds. First, the annual AOM allocation increases 27% in the analyzed period. More concretely, we observed an annual increment of at least 5% in the last two years. Second, the sponsorship amount declined of 56% in the revised period with a dramatically reduction since 2015. This issue explained a charge in the ticket price of the Ent Division Social Meeting since 2014. Importantly, the sponsors’ contributions have remained almost constant during the last three years.

Regarding the annual operating expenses, we have seen an 80% increase in the total expenses from 2012 to 2018. The explanations of increment are the following ones. First, approximately 67% of the total annual expenses are linked with the Mid-winter and Annual meetings (social events, food and beverage). Specifically, this expense grew almost 90% in the revised period. One reason is the increasing prices associated with the conferences’ venues. For example, the 2018 Chicago annual meeting reported an increment of 11% in this expense in contrast to the expenses reported in the 2017 Atlanta annual meeting. Other reason includes the actions of the ENT Division to achieve the goal of capturing and disseminating doctoral, early career and mid-career consortia. Second, approximately 20% of the annual operating expenses are awards expenses. The awards expenses have increased 162% in this period. Remarkably, the awards expenses showed the highest increment of 39% in 2018.

Along this review, we have seen that the ENT Division with the support of AOM and sponsors has kept a good management of the incomes and expenses. To look forward, the available funds to our division on January 1, 2019 are $43,693.00 plus the balance forward from 2018. Moreover, this review is part of two financial reports that will be discussed by the Entrepreneurship Division Committee during the Mid-winter Meeting in Boca Raton (Florida). In my role, I hope to contribute to the division’s challenges and financial shape to be ready for the current goals and forthcoming projects.

All the best for the new entrepreneurial year!

Maribel Guerrero, ENT Division Treasurer

Division chair's message

November 7, 2018

Dear Members of the Entrepreneurship Division!

It is an honor and a privilege to serve as the Chair of the amazing Entrepreneurship Division during the coming year. With approximately 3,600 members, our Division is one of the largest and continues to be one of the fastest growing within the Academy. Consistent with the roots of our discipline, we remain vibrant, nimble, and innovative, tackling a number of new initiatives that I will share with you below.

At the Business Meeting during the annual conference in Chicago, we celebrated a number of accomplishments and recognized a few of our outstanding colleagues for their tireless service to the Division and its members.

• In recognition of his extraordinary contributions in the area of mentoring, Tom Lumpkin was awarded the “Mentor Award”.
• With the generous sponsorship of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and consistent with our mission of “We grow entrepreneurship scholars,” the Division launched the “Emerging Scholar Award.” This award honors junior faculty who have established a record of scholarship that has the potential to make innovative and impactful contributions to the body of entrepreneurship research. The inaugural winners of this award were Greg Fisher, Matthew Grimes, and Laura Huang. During the Division’s plenary session Greg, Matthew Laura shared their passionate insights in pursuit of their groundbreaking research.
• Christina Guenther took on her role as Past-Chair.
• Sarah Jack took on her role as the incoming Professional Development Workshop (PDW) Chair.
• Maribel Guerrero succeeded Marcos Hashimoto as Division Treasurer.
• Jill Kickul, Norris Krueger, Ren, and Trent Williams assumed their positions as newly elected Representatives at Large, replacing Peter Klein, Rachida Justo, Florian Taube, and Justin Webb.
• Jill Kickul and Jim Combs succeeded Erik Monsen as Co-Chairs of the Research Committee.
• Rashida Justo succeeded Linda Sama as the Chair of the Teaching Committee.
• Mirjam Knockaert succeeded Siri Terjesen as Chair of the Membership Committee. I’d like to offer a special “shout out” to Siri, who created and championed the ENT Division Pins Program for the last 3 years, a fun tradition surely to be continued by Mirjam.
• Ersa Memili succeeded Norris Krueger as the Chair of the Global Scholars Committee.
• John Mueller will continue to serve as Chair of the Practitioner-Scholar Committee.

As noted above, a few new initiatives are part of my agenda for the coming year. First, Dawn DeTienne, Gry Agnete Alsos, Jim Combs and Jill Kickul have spearheaded the launch of a new mentoring system for our Division. In this first year test-phase, students from the 2018 Consortium will be matched with experienced scholars in our Division, who have volunteered to connect with their mentees once a month to discuss a variety of issues. The Division hopes to roll out this program more broadly next year and make the mentoring-mentee opportunity more widely available. Second, given the size and the number of submissions the Division receives for the annual meeting, the task of the Program Chair has simply become too large for a single individual to manage. Thus, the Executive Committee of the Division will consider revising our policies and procedures to manage the program tasks more efficiently. Other large Divisions within the Academy provide templates for us to consider. Third, given the increasing demand for our Doctoral, Early Career, and Mid-Career Consortia, and the difficulty of finding time on the PDW program for other innovative initiatives, such as the Women’s and Late Career Consortia, the Executive Committee will consider steps to deliver consortia content more efficiently and to make this content available to those who were unable to attend these valuable sessions.

I am looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible at the Annual Meeting in Boston in August 2019. There are a number of ways for you to get involved:

SUBMIT!

Announcements regarding deadlines for the PDW, symposia, awards, and paper sessions for the Annual meeting are soon to follow. Be on the lookout for calls from Peter Klein and Sarah Jack regarding these activities on the program. Ph.D. student who graduated or plan to graduate within the 2018 calendar year are especially encouraged to submit their dissertation for either the Heizer or National Federation of Independent Businesses Dissertation Awards. Dawn DeTienne will be announcing those details soon.

REVIEW!

In order to manage the growing number of manuscripts the Division receives for consideration at the Annual Conference, we need over 1,500 reviewers. Please look for calls for reviewers. When you submit your PDWs, symposia, and papers for the annual meeting, please volunteer to review. Volunteering to review is a critical step towards discovery. Please be a good professional citizen and register to review and advance the scholarship in our Division through thoughtful, developmental reviews.

VOLUNTEER!

There are a few opportunities to become more involved with the Division. The Awards, Communication, Events Planning Logistics, Practitioner Scholar, and Research Committees are looking for volunteers. If you are interested, please send an email expressing your interest to dneubaum@fau.edu.

Finally, I would like to extend a warm, personal thanks to those colleagues who have been instrumental in the development and growth of our Division. The Division is where is it today because of your generous, tireless effort. Thanks to Carlo Salvato and Alain Fayolle for your mentorship and sage advice. Special thanks to Christina Guenther not only for her calm and capable leadership of the Division this past but also for the many timely responses to urgent emails, with me asking “what am I supposed to do now?” Christina made everyone’s job easier by doing hers so very well. Thanks in advance to Diane Sullivan, Division Secretary, who I am sure will be extremely busy keeping me organized this coming year. I look forward to hosting our amazing Executive Committee team at the Mid-Winter meeting in January where we will continue to plan a path of excellence for this Division.

Warm Regards,

Donald O. Neubaum

ENT Division Chair

Out-going chair's message

September 8, 2018

Dear Entrepreneurship Scholars and ENT Division Members,

It has been a great pleasure working with all of you over the last years in the ENT Division and beyond to realize our mission to grow entrepreneurship scholars.

I would like to thank and recognize everyone who served our Division e.g. , committee member, committee chair, representatives at large, or consortia leader by bringing an invaluable contribution to our entrepreneurship community. Without your dedication and commitment, it would be impossible to serve our members throughout the year and especially at our annual meetings. I highly appreciate your continuous support and hard work.

Close to the end of my five-year leadership cycle, I would like to express my deep thanks more particularly to Carlo Salvato and Alain Fayolle for guiding me through my years of service for the Division and our outgoing committee chairs, Erik Monsen (Research Committee), Norris Krueger (Global Scholar Development Committee Chair), Linda Sama (Teaching Committee Chair), Siri Terjesen (Membership Committee Chair), and our treasurer Marcos Hashimoto.

As you know, in 2017, AoM renewed the Divison status of ENT for another five years based on the five-year review (2011-2016). During this academic we have already accomplished several ambitious goals set out in the report for our future plans. First, let me thank Lou Marino, Jeff Pollack, Ulrich Möller, and Josh Wei-Jun Hsueh for mastering the challenge to lead us through the transition towards our new communication platform, Connect@AOM. Second, Dawn DeTienne established the emerging scholar award based on the generous Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation grant. Thanks to this initiative and the award judges, we could recognize and celebrate three emerging scholars and their outstanding scientific contributions this year in Chicago. Third, also within the scope of this grant, Dawn and Gry Agnete Alsos pioneered to establish a mentoring system for our Division. With the help of this mentoring program, we are certain to improve our reach to young entrepreneurship scholars throughout the year and the globe. Lastly, our Division contributed to setting up a cross-divisional specialized conference on “From Start-up to Scale-up: Coping with Organizational Challenges in a Volatile Business Environment“ in Tel-Aviv, jointly organized with OMT, STR, IM, OB, and TIM.

For the coming year, the Division will experience a few changes as we have new people in Division leadership positions. Let us welcome Rachida Justo (Chair of the Teaching Committee), Jill Kickul & Jim Combs (Co-chairs of the Research Committee), Mirjam Knockaert (Chair of the Membership Committee), Ersa Memili (Chair of the Global Scholar Development Committee), and John Mueller (Chair of the Practitioner-Scholar Committee). Moreover, a very warm welcome to Sarah Jack, our newly elected PDW Chair, and Maribel Guerrero, our new treasurer.

I am fully convinced that the ENT Division will be lead into a bright future as we have a great set of volunteers to turn our ambitious plans into reality. This is now in the very capable hands of Don Neubaum, Dawn DeTienne, Peter Klein and Sarah Jack.

Warm regards,
Christina Guenther
AoM ENT Division Immediate Past Chair


Reflections from the PDW Chair
Improving your chances in future submissions

The Division’s Professional Development Program has become a highlight of the Annual Meeting. Professional Development Workshops (PDWs) focus on novel and provocative themes, emphasize innovative and interactive formats, and allow for learning and interaction beyond what takes place in the regular paper and panel sessions. As they continue to grow in popularity.

This year we received 38 PDW submissions, a 33% increase over the previous two years. Unfortunately, our allotment of hours by AOM has not kept pace. After accounting for the hours assigned to the Doctoral, Early-Career, Mid-Career, and the new Late-Career Consortia we had fewer than 40 hours to allocate among these submissions. Consequently, we could only accept 19 proposals, and some sessions received hours than requested. My thanks to all submitters for an amazing variety of high-quality proposals; I regret that only some could be accommodated.

I have been a PDW submitter and participant for many years but learned a lot from sitting in the PDW Chair’s seat. Here are a few observations and suggestions for improving your chances in future submissions.

PDWs are not paper or panel sessions. PDWs are meant as complements, not substitutes, for the regular AOM program. They should not cover conventional themes and topics or be structured as traditional paper or panel sessions. Rather, PDWs should be innovative in content and structure, exploring issues and encouraging interactions not usually featured in the main program. The most effective PDWs encourage interaction among individuals and groups which do not typically participate in the same sessions, workshops, and activities: not only within the Entrepreneurship Division (e.g., between junior and senior scholars, between academics and practitioners, among scholars from different countries, among academics following different career paths, and so on), but also across the divisional lines of the Academy. For this reason, it's smart to work with colleagues within and outside the Division and submit appropriate PDW proposals which have broad appeal to the Academy membership at large.

Content is king. I was particularly attracted to sessions exploring novel themes, taking unusual perspectives, and involving top-notch participants, especially people not usually involved with the Division (or the Academy itself). This applies both to research- and teaching-oriented proposals. Several submitters took advantage of the location to invite eminent scholars or practitioners from the Chicago area to participate in sessions. Among the successful submissions are PDWs on hot topics like inequality, blockchains, field experiments, gamification, and biological approaches to entrepreneurship. Several session at the relationship between entrepreneurship and civil society, public policy, “grand challenges,” and similar social and political issues. Others focus on modeling techniques, pedagogy, and emerging issues in entrepreneurship theory such as external enablers, Knightian uncertainty, and real options. Of course, proposals dealing with classic topics, themes, and issues are welcome. But it is hard to stand out in a crowded field with a topic that has been explored many times before.

is important. Some proposals featured excellent content but did not give much thought to format. Keep in mind that the submission instructions ask for detailed information on structure and timing. Frankly, “an introduction to the session, presentations by our N distinguished panelists, roundtable discussion, and summary remarks” is not a very exciting format. I’ve attended many such PDWs over the years in which the distinguished panelists each run a bit over their allotted time and the table talk morphs into five minutes of Q&A—basically a two-hour lecture session. I tended to favor sessions with a more interactive, developmental, collaborative, or “flipped” format. We emphasize experiential learning in our classrooms; why not do the same at our conferences? Pay close attention to structure in developing your proposals.

Provide appropriate details. While a concise and readable narrative is always the best, it helps to be as specific and detailed as possible about theme, participants, and structure. Why is this topic likely to interest Division members (and, if possible, to attract people outside the Division)? Why are these participants appropriate? (Most successful proposals provide brief biographical information on the key participants and explain how their background and experience fit the rest of the session.) Why is the proposed format the most suitable?

Ask for help. When developing proposals feel free to reach out to the PDW Chair, other Division officers, more experienced submitters, and others for help. The submission process itself is developmental and Division officers are happy to listen, answer questions, and provide suggestions as you develop your proposals. The Academy posts information on PDWs at http://aom.org/annualmeeting/submission/guidelines. If you need additional information, please consider examining the previous year’s program at http://aom.org/Meetings/Past-Meetings or consider contacting someone who was successful in previous years. As with proposals, examining an “” submission may help you through the process.

Thanks again to all who participated in the submission process. See you in Chicago!

Peter G. Klein

2018 PDW Chair

A message from the Division Chair

Dear Members of the Entrepreneurship Division!

It's hard to believe that 2017 has almost gone by. This is a great opportunity to review the exciting events of the last year and have a preview on the months to come. With 3,585 members worldwide, ENT is still among the fastest growing divisions of the Academy of Management … and counting! Our five-year review, headed by Alain Fayolle, clearly revealed that we are an interdisciplinary, international and vibrant community with creative initiatives and, of course, great social events. 2017 has been a year with many important milestones for the Division:

• In recognition of their outstanding long-term contributions to our field and in the area of mentoring, Dean A. Sheperd was awarded our prestigious “Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award” and Charles H. Matthews received the ENT “Mentor Award”
• Alain Fayolle took on his role as Past-Chair
• Peter Klein was elected as the new PDW Chair
• Gry Agnete Alsos, Marie-Louise Verreynne, Donald Siegel, and Denis Gregoire will serve the Division as newly elected RALs
• April Franco has succeeded Tim Folta as Chair of the Awards Committee, Lou Marino has succeeded Kathleen Randerson as the Chair of the Communications Committee, and
• Franz Lohrke took over the Chair position of the Historian Committee from Hans Landström.

I am looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Chicago in August 2018. Stay tuned for announcements on events, dates deadlines concerning PDWs, symposia, awards and paper submissions for 2018 by Don, Dawn, and Peter! Please do not forget to volunteer to REVIEW for the meeting and thank you in advance for helping us to grow entrepreneurship scholars also through reviewing!

As Division Chair of 2018, I have dedicated myself to the support of emerging scholars in our Division, taking our slogan "We grow entrepreneurship scholars" at the very heart. With the strong support of Dawn and the Kauffman Foundation particular, we will seek to stimulate discussions and actions aiming at improving the way through which we help emerging scholars in our discipline to grow and advance the field of entrepreneurship.

I count on the devotion of you, dear members, to continue to support our Division and community that we are all proud to be a part off.

Last, but certainly not least, let me take the opportunity to thank all of you who make the ENT spirit come alive through your time, efforts and dedication to the Division. A brief letter does, unfortunately, not allow me to thank many of you in person. Let me address some of you by name as representatives of all diligent members working on stage and behind the scenes. Thanks go to Carlo Salvato, Alain Fayolle and our past Committee Chairs Kathleen, Hans, and Tim for their numerous years of impressive commitment and service to support the Division and its members. It’s a great to your footsteps. Our amazing team of Division officers and I will do our best to keep up with your impressive legacy.

Yours sincerely,

Christina Günther
ENT Division Chair