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!
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