Entrepreneurship

Description of the video:

My broad research interest is entrepreneurship, but underneath that umbrella, I'm really interested in entrepreneurial strategies, so what makes newer ventures competitive, allowing them to compete and often out-compete larger ventures. Then in addition to that, I'm interested in how they get resources, what they do to be very resourceful in resource-constrained environments, and what they do to convince others to give them resources as they grow, develop, and scale. Because I'm interested in this concept of entrepreneurial hustle, it's a sort of concept that's been developed in the academic research. I'm very interested in what settings it might apply to or where it might be used in the real world. We've tested it in entrepreneurial accelerators or examined the extent to which entrepreneurs use it in entrepreneurial accelerators. But I'm interested in the extent to which it might be utilized and applied and translate into results in corporations, larger corporations where people are trying to do entrepreneurial stuff, in social ventures where people are trying to solve social problems and or in governmental organizations where people are often confronted with a whole lot of bureaucracy that they need to overcome and acting with a sense of urgency and unorthodoxy, which underpin the concept of entrepreneurial hustle might actually help them to break some of those barriers. So I'd be very interested in people coming in, adopting the scale that we've developed and looking at the extent to which it applies in very pragmatic but different settings within the business world and beyond.

Description of the video:

My research interest for years has been in the area of corporate entrepreneurship or corporate innovation. Actually, I built my career based on that. It was the consulting that I did and major Fortune 500 companies, which transitioned to a whole line of research that I was able to accomplish having access to those companies. And so I've really produced a number of articles in that field. I've been actually ranked in some journal articles as one of the most prolific authors in corporate entrepreneurship, which has been really fabulous. My latest book has just come out. As a matter of fact, I'm going to just show you that as I lean down to grab it on corporate innovation. Subtitle is called Disruptive Thinking in Organizations. And so I really tried to distill from my research and my practice and consulting and everything into this book and stuff, which has been really, you know, kind of a joy to put together. So just wanted to share with that. My research now, though, has transitioned to a number of different areas. So some of the projects that I've worked on more recently are in the area of a concept we developed here with Dr. Greg Fisher called Entrepreneurial Hustle. And we developed that with some of our Ph.D. students where we developed that whole concept, which is urgent and unorthodox actions that an entrepreneur will take to either grab two opportunities, new opportunities, or to avoid some disruptions in the venture. So that's been really fun to work on over the last couple of years. and we actually developed, which was just published last year, an actual scale to measure entrepreneurial hustle. So we're going to be doing a lot more work with that scale now in the area of entrepreneurial hustle with entrepreneurs. A second area that I've been working on recently is a major national study that we did. We had contacted 114 entrepreneurial support organizations, accelerators, incubators, if you will, and we worked with them to establish we needed to talk to actual coaches and mentors in those accelerators along with some of the startups that they were working with to try to see how important is the coachability of an entrepreneur and how important is the relationship between matching the proper coach or mentor with the entrepreneur and so in a number of our studies we were able to from those 114 organizations we were able to get about 375 coaches involved in our study and 675 entrepreneurs. So it's been a major study that we conducted over about a two-year period, and that data we are still working from, and we've established already a number of different premises that we're working from, and we've actually published a number of articles, but more to come. So that's been some of my really fun projects over the last couple of years and showing kind of currently where I'm at.

Description of the video:

Yeah, so I tend to study what I call funky contacts. I'm a phenomenologist, so I study things that just interest me, and often that comes from just interviewing and interacting with people. I've interviewed people as diverse as street performers in New Orleans. I have a stream of research on craft breweries. I've interviewed millionaire and billionaire founders who have exited their businesses, and I also have a research project on Amish entrepreneurs. And so I tend to engage in qualitative methods. I enjoy getting out and being in communities and interviewing entrepreneurs. Yeah, so most recently I've been working on a project with Amish entrepreneurs. And the funny thing about Amish entrepreneurs is that they have a 95% survival rate over five years, which is exponentially higher than most of the U.S. population. And so that naturally begs the question of, well, why? And there are many, many reasons why, but one of the unique things about Amish businesses is that as they grow, rather than kind of grow their own companies, they often spin out growth opportunities to other individuals in their community. And so what you see is that rather than just sort of one organization dominating an area, you see hundreds of entrepreneurial firms spread out throughout communities. And they actually help each other get started and they help each other grow. And so that's been a long and exciting project, but it's just been fascinating for me to always study and get into context and interact with people who are a little bit different than I am. and exposes you to different ways of seeing the world. So in addition to doing qualitative methods, I often study identity, particularly the identity of founders and also the identity of collectives or groups of firms. And I also have a keen interest in understanding smaller artisan craft organizations. I'm particularly fascinated by founders who are somewhat reluctant business owners who kind of askew growth and askew stereotypes that we typically associate with founders of big companies.