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Welcome from Conference Chair
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
Conference Chair
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