History of Entrepreneurship

Message from the Historian Committee Chair (July 2024)

Patrick J. Murphy
University of Alabama at Birmingham
ENT Division Historian and Committee Chair

Greetings colleagues. As you probably know, we're undertaking an oral history research project focused on the ENT Division. Here's a brief recap and progress update.

The ENT Division was established in 1986. As our community approaches 40 years of formal history, it's a good time to capture high-quality primary source accounts of that history directly from the original founders and early architects of the ENT division and of the entrepreneurship field.

I serve as ENT Division historian and chair of the historian committee (Members: Gianpaolo Abatecola, Susan M. T. Coombes, Dimo Dimov, Luisa Guimarães, Dan Wadhwani). Last year, our team hired two formally trained historians (Jessica Roseberry, Ellen Roberts) with oral history research expertise to conduct the in-depth interviews required for this project. We've also enlisted a five-person team of library scientists and archivists from the UAB Library. The library team's job is to package archival quality copies of the recordings, deposit them into long-term digital preservation storage, curate the recordings, and upload the full records to digital collections for posterity. This process will make the oral histories permanently and globally accessible for scholars and historians in the future. The work is being done in accordance with industry standards for oral history research, library collections, and archival technologies (permissions, copyrights, etc.). We've coordinated this project with the AOM leadership and legal teams. We are currently planning for the oral histories to be available to the public in 2026. They'll be useful for research purposes and also in educational settings, such as doctoral seminars.

In 2023, the ENT Division executive committee and historian committee identified 28 interviewees. By the time you read this, the two historians are on schedule to have completed 14 interviews. Our team is still working to find contact information for a few interviewees. One interviewee declined to participate, and several interviewees have not yet been contacted. Our goal is to complete all the interviews in 2024 and all the transcriptions and curation activities in 2025. We believe this project is an important one at this stage in the history of the ENT Division.

Thank you to the historian committee members, my ENT executive committee colleagues, ENT division membership, and the AOM for supporting this project. We'll keep the division community posted on our progress. Please contact me anytime with questions or feedback.

(Past messages)

Historian Committee

Patrick J. Murphy (Chair)
Gianpaolo Abatecola
Susan M. T. Coombes
Dimo Dimov
Luisa Guimarães
Dan Wadhwani

History of the Division

The History of the Entrepreneurship Division by Hans Landström and Jon Lindhe v.1

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The History of the Entrepreneurship Division by Hans Landström and Jon Lindhe v.2

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Pioneer Profiles

William B. Gartner

William B. Gartner is an American entrepreneurship scholar and Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Art of Innovation, at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is also Professor of Entrepreneurship at the California Lutheran University in the US.

Gartner is considered a pioneer within his field, known for his belief in a behavioral approach and narrative methodology in entrepreneurship research. He was one of the first scholars within the field who advocated a shift from focusing on the individual traits of the entrepreneur, which was common during the 70s and 80s, to studying entrepreneurship as a behavioral process (Landström 2010).

Patricia P. McDougall-Covin

Patricia P. McDougall-Covin is an American scholar in the fields of Strategic Management, Entrepreneurship and International Business. She is Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Institute for International Business at Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. McDougall is considered a pioneering scholar of entrepreneurship and strategic management and she has made significant contributions to the knowledge of multinational enterprise (Kelly school of business, 2015).

Arnold C. Cooper

Arnold C. Cooper Professor Arnold Cooper (March 9, 1933 – December 6, 2012) was a management scholar and a pioneer in the field of entrepreneurship and strategic management. During his academic career, that spanned over 40 years, Arnold Cooper made several significant contributions to the overall knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship. He also played a significant part in organizing the research field and he helped the elevation of entrepreneurship research to a higher academic level (Landström, 2010).

Karl H. Vesper

Karl H. Vesper Karl Hampton Vesper (b. 1932) is an American scholar and Professor emeritus of Management, Mechanical Engineering and Marine Studies at the University of Washington(WA). Vesper is known as a pioneer in the field of entrepreneurship research and education. He has launched several entrepreneurship courses and programs, and he has been involved in organizing some of the first conferences on entrepreneurship in the US (Spears school of business 2015).