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Seminar for PhDs helps train next wave of entrepreneurship scholars.
Entrepreneurship doesn't just reshape the economy. Lately, it has been shaking up the halls of academe, too. For the last decade, scholars increasingly have studied the ways in which entrepreneurs and their firms spark the "creative destruction" that famed economist Joseph Schumpeter said characterizes healthy, innovative economies.
The Wharton School is one of the leading research centers in this emerging field, thanks partly to the work of experts Ian C. MacMillan, director of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, and Raphael "Raffi" Amit, academic director of the Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program.
For
MacMillan and Amit, who are both Wharton management professors, part
of their role is training their successors—that is, the next generation
of entrepreneurship scholars. To that end they, along with such fellow
Wharton management professors as Ben Campbell, Gary Dushnitsky and David
Hsu, teach a PhD seminar on the field and its methods.
"Entrepreneurship
is a driver of economic and social well-being, and as scholars, we're
privileged to have a chance to get a deeper understanding of why many ventures
fail and a few succeed," says Amit, who is the lead professor in this
fall's seminar. "It's an important area of research that
needs the best minds to make a difference."
The seminar, Amit says, aims to expose PhD students to theoretical and empirical perspectives on entrepreneurship research. The seminar focuses on the main questions that define the entrepreneurship field and attempts to critically examine how, using a range of methodologies, researchers have approached these questions. Through discussions of the received literature, students seek to identify promising research areas.
In addition to addressing the content of the entrepreneurship literature, students are exposed to the process of crafting research papers and getting them published in top tier journal. A top scholar's output is measured not just terms of productivity, but also quality. Researchers have to be both productive—regularly publishing papers in respected journals—and, to some extent, profound. The best papers change the way future researchers see their field.
Brian Wu, a Wharton doctoral candidate in management, took the seminar three years ago. "It gave me a perspective on what's going on with entrepreneurship studies in different disciplines—economics, sociology, even psychology," he says. What's more, it helped him identify "empirical settings in which I could test my ideas—it got me very excited about high-tech industries."
As a result of the class, Wu and a fellow Wharton doctoral student, Gregory Kruse, decided to use the medical-device industry as a setting for research on market entry and innovation. Their resulting paper won the Best Paper Award from the Technology Innovation Management Division at the annual Academy of Management conference this year.
A visit to one of Amit's classes gives a sense of the breadth of scholarship that aspiring scholars at Wharton cover in a semester.
On this fall day, the students—a mix of Wharton doctoral candidates and young visiting scholars from abroad—are arguing about what would seem to be a heretical question in an entrepreneurship class: Can entrepreneurs be unproductive, taking more from the economy than they contribute?
To prepare for class, Amit has asked them to read a much-cited paper in which William Baumol, a respected economist at New York University, argues that not all entrepreneurship contributes to society. "At times, the entrepreneur may even lead a parasitical existence that is actually damaging to the economy," Baumol writes. He points to drug dealers, mercenaries and Mafiosi.
Clearly, Baumol argues, these folks are entrepreneurs: They're using smarts and guile to secure profit and position in society. Their activities may not be legal in the modern developed world, but that doesn't make them any less entrepreneurial. You could say that they take "creative destruction" to an unfortunate extreme.
Or consider the activities of noblemen in the Middle Ages, he writes. They devoted far more of their time to fighting than to farming or commerce. For them, warfare was a source of economic gain—an entrepreneurial activity. Their most sought-after sources of wealth were land and castles, and they seized them by attacking neighbors. Their martial obsession even led to innovations like the stirrup and the crossbow. "These innovations can be interpreted as contributions of military entrepreneurs undertaken at least partly in pursuit of private economic gains," he writes.
What do you think, Amit asks the class, can entrepreneurs be parasites? Who might fit into this category today?
A student raises his hand, volunteering an answer: "Corporate raiders."
"But don't they discipline managers?" Amit shoots back. "Anybody else have any ideas?" Amit offers an answer of his own.
"One possibility might be the lawyers who sued Research in Motion over the Blackberry. All they did was buy the patent, and then they threatened to shut down BlackBerry. They could've shut down a service that a lot of people use, though they ended up settling. What economic or societal value was created there? Maybe it signals to companies and patent holders that patents are serious matters, so you could say that it upholds patent law."
Another student volunteers that she doesn't buy Baumol's distinction between productive and unproductive entrepreneurship. His definition seems so broad, she says, that she can't discern what wouldn't qualify as entrepreneurship. Everyone with an economic motive—which means just about everyone in society—seems to count.
Amit agrees. "It's unclear what he means by unproductive entrepreneurship. He says a drug dealer is an unproductive entrepreneur. A drug dealer is clearly an entrepreneur, and in the U.S., what he does is illegal. But what about in Holland, where drugs are legal? Is he unproductive there?"
"This is a seminal paper, a key conceptual piece in the field," Amit adds. "Baumol is using Schumpeter as a point of departure and saying entrepreneurs can push the economy off a point of equilibrium."
What you should learn from it, he tells the class, is that scholars can take different paths to making a breakthrough contribution. They might be the first to describe a phenomenon. They might introduce a new method that enables colleagues in their field to pose new questions. They might uncover or compile a rich new database and show how accepted theories play out in a new setting. Or like Baumol, they might take known facts and frameworks and reinterpret them in a creative way.
"One measure of a good paper is whether it promotes a lot of debate."
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Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs
Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center
Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program