Entrepreneurial Research Areas by Faculty

Wharton entrepreneurship CO-directors

Raffi Amit, Robert B. Goergen Professor of Entrepreneurship

• Research Areas: Entrepreneurship; family business; strategic management; venture capital financing; eBusiness
• Current Projects: Family Ownership, Control and Management and Firm Performance; Family Office; Business Model Design and Performance; Venture Capital Financing of Entrepreneurial Firms; Growth of Emerging Businesses; Strategic Alliance Activity and Firm Performance

 Ian MacMillan, Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Director, Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center

• Research Areas: Organizational competence; new venture management; entrepreneurship; strategic management
• Current Projects: Technology strategy; rapid growth firms; societal wealth enterprising

standing faculty - management department

David Hsu, Associate Professor of Management; Richard A. Sapp Associate Professor

• Research Areas: Start-up innovation; strategies for commercializing technological innovation; venture capital; intellectual property rights
• Current Projects: Intellectual property and patenting strategies by start-ups; competition between industry incumbents and start-ups in high-tech industries; entrepreneurship and innovation

Laura Huang, Assistant Professor of Management

• Research Areas: Investor decision making; Individual perceptions and cognitions in entrepreneurial funding decisions
• Current Projects: Micro-level foundations of entrepreneurship; Individual perceptions and cues in angel investing decisions; A gut feel-based theory of entrepreneurial investment decisions

 Ethan Mollick, Edward B. and Shirley R. Shils Assistant Professor of Management

• Research Areas: Entrepreneurship in innovative industries; industry evolution; role of individuals in firm success; distributed and user innovation; self-organization among individuals; entrepreneurial strategy
• Current Projects: Exploration of the role of individuals compared to firms in explaining the development of the computer gaming industry; study of the interaction between hackers and firms in the nascent markets; examination of the ways in which institutions shape individual approaches to innovation

 Lori Rosenkopf, Simon and Mildred Palley Professor of Management

• Research Areas: Technological and organizational evolution; innovation diffusion; learning in inter-organizational networks
• Current Projects:  Understanding how networks of technical professionals and firms shape technological evolution; Evaluating the strategic value of alliances and hiring from competitors for knowledge acquisition in the semiconductor industry; tracking connections between technical committee activity, director/officer interlocks and alliances in the cellular industry; exploring how and when social capital of individuals accrues to firms

 Tyler Wry, Assistant Professor of  Management

• Research Areas: Technological evolution; venture funding in nascent industries; social entrepreneurship; the ‘self’ and venture creation
• Current Projects:  Exploring the distributed shaping of technological paths in nanotechnology; the relationship between intellectual property and venture financing in nanotechnology; understanding the emergence and performance of global microfinance organizations; examining how an entrepreneur’s identity shapes the venture creation process

standing faculty - other departments

Gavin Cassar, Assistant Professor of Accounting

• Research Areas: Budgeting and forecasting; entrepreneurship; financing choice and investment; internal controls; hedge funds; management accounting

 Mauro F. Guillen, Dr. Felix Zandman Professor in International Management; Director, Lauder Institute

• Research Areas: International management; globalization; diffusion of innovations
• Current Projects: Emerging-market multinational firms; new models in banking

Steve O. Kimbrough, Professor of Operations and Information Management

• Research Areas: Decision support systems; electronic commerce; artificial intelligence and computational rationality; logic modeling; evolutionary computation (including genetic algorithms and genetic programming)
• Current Projects: Knowledge-based decision support systems, U.S. Coast Guard; Intelligent filtering and retrieval of multi-media information, The Historic New Orleans Collection; Computational modeling of intelligent adaptation, The University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation

Peter D. Linneman, Emeritus Professor of Real Estate

• Research Areas: Real estate finance and strategy; mergers and acquisitions
• Current Projects: Examining the commercial property markets; the evolution of real estate securities markets; corporate real estate usage; international real estate investments

Leonard M. Lodish, Samuel R. Harrell Professor of Marketing; Vice Dean, Program for Social Impact; Leader and Co-founder, Global Consulting Practicum

• Research Areas: Marketing decision support systems; marketing experimentation; entrepreneurial marketing; expert systems in marketing; sales force decision support; marketing resource allocation; promotion and advertising decision support
• Current Projects: Using store scanner to estimate attribute importances & marketing mix impacts; command and control systems for marketing mix planning and execution

G. Richard Shell, Thomas Gerrity Professor; Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Management

• Research Areas: Negotiation, power and influence in organizations; the psychology of success; commercial arbitration; contracts; legal and political aspects of competitive strategy
• Current Projects:Researching a book tentatively titled The Success Seminar: Defining and Achieving Success in Business and Everyday Life

Luke Taylor, Assistant Professor of Finance

• Research Areas: Corporate finance, corporate governance, entrepreneurship, learning
• Current Projects: Investigating the role of entrepreneurial learning in the IPO decision and post-IPO profitability; Using structural models to examine why CEOs are rarely fired

Karl Ulrich, CIBC Professor of Entrepreneurship and eCommerce; Vice Dean of Innovation

• Research Areas: Innovation; product design and development; entrepreneurship
• Current Projects:Managing innovation pipelines; opportunity identification; collaboration tools for innovation