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Welcome from
Conference Co-Chairs
Dear Colleagues,
We live in an age of obsolescence, an
age where the half life of business
models and strategic resources is
declining steadily but rapidly. Several
factors are responsible for this trend,
chief among them: (a) ongoing
technological revolution, whereby
products and services based on new
technologies or novel combinations of
existing technologies may be far
superior to existing ones, (b) the
Internet effect, which reduces search
and switching costs for customers while
also increasing the transparency of any
firm's actions to its competitors, and
(c) globalization, whereby new
competitors with distinctly different
capabilities can emerge from a distant
part of the world and steal the market
away from incumbents within a fairly
short period of time.
In an age such as this, preservation and
creation of economic value depends
fundamentally on how smart the
organization is at discovering,
inventing, and commercializing new
products, new services, and new
processes for customer segments that
seem always to be in flux. In other
words, on a worldwide basis, the future
belongs to entrepreneurs, be they
individuals founding a de novo venture
or a top management team transforming
and reinventing the established
enterprise. Entrepreneurship, however,
is a double-edged sword. Not being
entrepreneurial equals forgone
opportunities for economic growth and
wealth creation. On the other hand,
deciding to be entrepreneurial requires
significant efforts for resource
mobilization and recombination with no
guarantee of success, financial or
otherwise. In fact, entrepreneurial
efforts often fail and the challenge for
academics and practitioners alike is to
develop a better understanding of the
entrepreneurial process with a hope to
improve its efficiency and
effectiveness.
 Given the complexity of the phenomenon,
it is unlikely that we will run out of
interesting research questions to ponder
and tackle. Our goal with this
conference is to strengthen the
community of scholars seeking to address
such questions and to create a forum for
sharing research efforts that chip away
at the areas of ignorance with regard to
this highly important domain. We thank
you all for agreeing to contribute to
this endeavor and welcome you to the
Smith School. We are delighted to see
you here and we hope that the value
added of the conference will make it a
much anticipated annual event.
Sincerely,
Dr.
Anil K. Gupta & Dr.
Violina P. Rindova
Conference Co-Chairs
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