Entrepreneurship is often thought of strictly in terms of
new venture creation. But as the half-life of technologies,
products and business models becomes ever shorter,
established companies are finding that their existing bases
of competitive advantage are decaying and becoming obsolete
at a faster rate. And these established companies are facing
competition on two fronts: from new ventures that emerge and
seek to push them aside, and from existing companies that
are transforming themselves through internal entrepreneurial
efforts.
Even large companies such as Wal-Mart have little choice
but to constantly retain an entrepreneurial drive. For
example, today, the company is in the early stages of
creating a new division for smaller convenience stores,
which would have a business model very different from the
Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart discount store model. The company is
also creating a bank within Wal-Mart Inc. to provide retail
banking services.
 Organizations
at every level of development must be entrepreneurial in
their efforts to stay competitive with rivals. That’s why
entrepreneurship research has become an increasingly
important endeavor. The Smith School’s Dingman Center for
Entrepreneurship supports research that interprets or
defines entrepreneurship broadly, focusing on both creating
and growing new ventures and developing entrepreneurial
ventures within larger, established companies. J. Robert
Baum, associate professor of management and organization, is
the center’s research director.
“The Dingman Center offers a wide variety of support for
entrepreneurship research and teaching,” says Baum. “We have
an awards program that offers prizes to PhD students and
seasoned faculty for research proposals, working papers and
published research. The contest standards are aligned with
standards of top journals to encourage successful
publication. Nascent research is supported through monthly
brown-bag lunch sessions with Dingman
Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, so that practitioners can guide
development of research questions and help identify data
sources. The center also maintains a database of
entrepreneurs who are interested in speaking to
entrepreneurship classes and offers an archive of sources of
research financing, including foundation and government
grants.”
Entrepreneurship research at Smith is conducted in a
variety of departments and is often cross-disciplinary in
scope. The school has one of the five largest faculties in
the world pursuing research projects rooted in
entrepreneurship, and they come from strategy,
organizational behavior, finance, as well as other domains.
Because Smith has such a large number of researchers who
are passionate about entrepreneurship, there are people
studying it from very different disciplines, addressing a
wide range of issues and publishing in very different top
journals. Baum publishes in the Journal of Applied
Psychology. Brent Goldfarb, assistant professor of
management and organization, is an economist who publishes
in the Journal of Financial Economics. David Kirsch,
associate professor of management and organization, is a
historian who publishes in a variety of journals including
Business History Review. Ralph J. Tyser Professor of
Strategy and Organization Anil Gupta, whose expertise is in
strategy and globalization, publishes in the Academy of
Management Journal.
“There are two types of approaches to research on
entrepreneurship,” says Gupta. “Until the 1990s, most
research on entrepreneurship was largely a-theoretical and
based on inductive generalizations from field studies. Smith
faculty are among the pioneers who come at entrepreneurship
research somewhat differently–combining strong
discipline-based theory with hard data about ground-level
reality. When you combine this approach to research with our
large number of researchers, we stand out as one of the best
entrepreneurship research groups in the country.”
Smith faculty leverage not only the financial resources
of the Dingman Center but also its rich network of
relationships within the entrepreneurial and venture capital
community. Doctoral student Antoaneta Petkova’s thesis on
how young ventures build credibility and reputation
conducted field interviews with entrepreneurs gleaned from
Dingman contacts, and then conducted a large database study.
The school held its fourth Annual Smith Entrepreneurship
Research Conference in April 2008. The conference featured
presentations on the founder effect, entrepreneurial
cognition, firms and networks, and creation of and entry
into new markets. The Dingman Center provided partial
funding for the conference as part of its research and
outreach efforts.
The center was started by then-dean Rudy Lamone in 1986
with a gift from Michael Dingman, founder of Signal
Corporation (later Allied Signal). It was one of the first
entrepreneurship centers in the nation and served as one of
the models for other regional entrepreneurship groups. In
1988 the Dingman Center, with representatives from the
University of Indiana and the University of Southern
California, established the Global Consortium of
Entrepreneurship Centers, a collection of university
entrepreneurship centers which now has more than 250
members. The center now focuses on incubating student-formed
companies, and has been instrumental in the launch of North
Star Games, Hook & Ladder Brewing Company, SHOP DC, and
Arcxis Biotechnologies—all enterprises started by Smith
students.
For more information about entrepreneurial research at
the Smith School, contact
jrbaum@rhsmith.umd.edu.
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