British Journal of Management: Entrepreneurial Finance in Honour of Mike Wright

Starts:  Mar 1, 2020 08:00 (BST)
Ends:  Apr 1, 2020 23:59 (BST)
Associated with  Entrepreneurship (ENT)
Entrepreneurial Finance in Honour of Mike Wright
Submission deadline: April 1, 2020 

Background of the Special Issue
Professor Mike Wright was a leading scholar in entrepreneurial finance, private equity, and buyouts, among other topics.  He is widely regarded as one of the early founders of research on private equity.  Mike was the Director of Center for Management Buyout Research, founded in March 1986 at Nottingham Business School, which was the first research center that collected data on private equity and management buyouts.  Mike explained on a few occasions that early in his career one of his senior colleagues told him that he would be ‘ruining his career’ by doing work on private equity, largely because it was not a well-established field at all when Mike started work on the topic.  Mike sure proved that prediction wrong, and most of us sure wish we had anything close to Mike’s career success: Mike published over 500 hundred papers, and has been cited over 75,000 times (Google Scholar as at December 2019: 78,414 citations, H-Index 138, i10-index 529).

In addition to his leading work on buyouts, private equity, and venture capital, Mike was an innovator on other topics in entrepreneurial finance, including the recent developments in crowdfunding and fintech, and the connections between entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial activities.  Mike not only contributed substantially to theory development in entrepreneurial finance, but also contributed to the development of databases and empirical methods and evidence-based scholarship.  These contributions are extremely important, particularly as data on topic has been scant particularly over the earlier years. 

Many junior scholars have been inspired to work on topics based on Mike’s early contributions. Mike devoted a vast amount of time to supporting and encouraging emerging scholars, and, on this account alone, leaves a vast legacy. Mike was a leader in the UK and worldwide.  Mike contributed substantially to the British Academy of Management, and to the British Journal of Management (BJM).  To this end, BJM will publish a special section of papers on entrepreneurial finance in honour of Mike Wright.  To this end, new research papers could be developed around the following themes:
  1. The evolution of private equity and buyouts over time, and its real consequences for firms and industries.
  2. The causes and consequences of development in new areas of entrepreneurial finance such as fintech and crowdfunding.
  3. International differences in entrepreneurial finance.
  4. Entrepreneurial finance in developing countries, including but not limited to microfinance.
  5. Public policy towards entrepreneurial finance.
  6. The intersection between entrepreneurial finance and innovation.
  7. Entrepreneurial finance, risk taking, and ethics. 
  8. Entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ecosystems.
  9. Entrepreneurial finance and its impact on HRM, work and employment.
Papers addressing other related current entrepreneurial finance questions are of course welcome.
 
Submissions and Review Process
A paper development workshop will be held at DAN Management, Western University in London, Ontario in June 2020 (date TBD).  Attendance is encouraged but is not a formal requirement for a paper to be accepted into the special section of BJM.

The deadline for submission to the workshop is April 1, 2020. Submissions should be sent to Douglas Cumming (cummingd@fau.edu) or Geoffrey Wood (gwood23@uwo.ca) with the subject line “BJM Workshop in Honour of Mike Wright”.  Prospective authors are welcome to address informal enquiries to the editors. Notifications about acceptance will be sent on or before April 30, 2020.

Fully developed manuscripts should be submitted to BJM by July 31, 2020.  Papers that incorporate feedback at the workshop will be expedited in the review process.

Final decisions on papers for the Special Issue will be made later in 2020. Please note that acceptance to the workshop does not necessarily guarantee acceptance to the BJM special section.