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!
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