AOM ENTFIN

In acknowledging current trends in the entrepreneurial finance literature and building upon the success of prior editions (2023 in Boston and 2024 in Chicago), this workshop aims to advance scholarly research by informing scholars on specific research opportunities and challenges in the field. Our panel consists of leading experts in the field who, collectively, have been cited over 57,000 times and serve on the editorial board of leading entrepreneurship, strategy, and management journals, including Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Organization Science, and Journal of Corporate Finance. In sum, this panel should again invigorate a pronounced and interactive discussion on how to move the field forward.

Time and location: Saturday 26 July from 14h30-16h30 at Copenhagen Bella Center: Hall B-B5-m5

Panelists (listed alphabetically)

Mario Amore is a Full Professor at Bocconi University and a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Research Member at the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI), and a Board Member at the International Corporate Governance Society (ICGS). He currently serves as Associate Editor of Management Science and Journal of Corporate Finance, and Editorial Review Board Member of Strategic Management Journal. Mario’s research focuses on family business, corporate governance, and strategy. Furthermore, he is interested in the decision-making of entrepreneurs and corporate managers. Mario’s works have been published in leading journals such as Management Science, Journal of Financial Economics, Strategic Management Journal, and Organization Science.

Massimo Colombo is a Full Professor of Innovation Economics, Entrepreneurship, and Entrepreneurial Finance. He is the president of the Italian Association of Management Engineering (AiIG) and Vice-Dean for Research and Rankings of the School of Management. He has published numerous books and articles in journals such as Science, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Industrial Economics, Research Policy, Small Business Economics, and many others.

Gary Dushnitsky is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. He also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on the economics of entrepreneurship, innovation, and the shifting landscape of entrepreneurial finance, exploring topics such as corporate venture capital, crowdfunding, and accelerators. His research has appeared in leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, and Journal of Management. He has received several academic distinctions, including the 2013 SMS Emerging Scholar Award, the 2009 Kauffmann Junior Faculty Fellowship, and several best dissertation prizes. He serves as the Co-Editor of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and a Senior Editor at Organization Science.

Ramana Nanda is a Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance and Academic Lead at the Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship at Imperial, a Research Fellow in the Financial Economics Programme of the CEPR, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School. His research examines financing frictions facing new ventures, with an aim to help entrepreneurs with fundraising and to shed light on how financial intermediaries, corporate R&D, and policy makers can improve the odds of selecting and commercializing the most promising ideas and technologies in the economy. For the academic years 2007 through 2020, Ramana was on the full-time faculty of Harvard Business School, most recently as Sarofim-Rock Professor and co-director of the Private Capital Project.  He received his Ph.D. from MIT's Sloan School of Management and has a BA and MA in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge, U.K. He is a recipient of the 2020 ERC Consolidator Grant and, 2015 Kauffman Prize Medal, that is awarded annually to one scholar under age 40 whose research has made a significant contribution to the literature in entrepreneurship. Prior to starting his Ph.D., Ramana was based in the London and New York offices of Oliver, Wyman & Company, where he worked primarily with clients in global capital markets as well as in small-business banking.  He continues to advise startup ventures on their financing strategies and also works with philanthropists and investors looking to back "deep tech" entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges.

Belén Villalonga is a Professor of Management and Organizations, the Yamaichi Faculty Fellow, and a Professor of Finance (by courtesy) at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Between 2001 and 2012 she was a faculty member at the Harvard Business School. Her work focuses on family business, corporate strategy, and corporate governance. She has written several articles on how family ownership and control influence firms’ governance and strategy and, ultimately, their performance, and published in Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Journal of Finance, and Journal of Financial Economics, among many others.

Andy Wu is the Arjun and Minoo Melwani Family Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the MBA and Executive Education programs. He researches, teaches, and advises managers on growth and innovation strategy in the technology industry. He received the HBS Wyss Award, HBS Williams Award, Poets & Quants 40 Under 40, and Penn Prize in recognition of commitment and excellence in teaching and mentoring. His research has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Strategy Science, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Annals, Harvard Business Review, and other top journals.

At this year's Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Katja Bringmann (Ghent University) and I organize a panel symposium on New Trends in Entrepreneurial Finance Research. More specifically, in acknowledging the disruptive nature of new trends in the entrepreneurial finance literature, this panel symposium aims to advance scholarly research by informing scholars on specific research opportunities and challenges in the field. Specifically, an increasing focus on addressing (i) enduring (grand) challenges, (ii) environmental, social, and governance aspects, and (iii) artificial intelligence have created a promising and exciting space to study entrepreneurial finance.

We have invited five leading experts in the field who, collectively, have published 282 papers, have been cited over 28,000 times, and serve(d) on the editorial board of leading entrepreneurship, strategy, and management journals, including Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Organization Science, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Research Policy, and many others. In sum, this panel should again invigorate a pronounced and interactive discussion on how to move the field forward.

Time and location: Tuesday 13 August from 13h15-14h45 (EDT) at Hyatt Regency Chicago in Skyway 272

Panelists (listed alphabetically)

Jorge Guzman is an associate professor at the Management Division in Columbia Business School. Jorge received his PhD from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and was previously a postdoc at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a lecturer at MIT Sloan. His research focuses on entrepreneurship policy, regional entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial strategy. He was previously involved in the Boston startup ecosystem, and has been an advisor to numerous startups on varied topics, and to regional and national policy agencies on the design of entrepreneurship ecosystems.

Lisa Hehenberger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Strategy and General Management at ESADE Business School and Director of its Center for Social Impact. She is a renowned expert on social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, impact investment, and impact measurement. Dr. Hehenberger is the Chief Impact Advisor of Oryx Impact, a fund of funds investing in African impact funds, a member of the Board of Directors of the GSMA Foundation, and sits on the impact committees of Rubio Impact Ventures and Suma Capital. She is on the Scientific Board of the OECD Global Action 'Promoting Social and Solidarity Economy Ecosystems', is a member of CNBC's Disruptor 50 Advisory Council, a group of leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship, and is a member of the Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium set up by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern.

Paul Momtaz currently works at TUM School of Management where he holds the “Professur für Entrepreneurial Finance.” Previously, he held the Chair of Private Equity at the House of Finance in Frankfurt, Professor Momtaz's hometown in Germany, where he had returned at the onset of the pandemic. He obtained his Ph.D. at UCLA and has affiliations with the Wharton School as the Metzler Visiting Professor in the Management Department and as a Research Associate with the Centre of Blockchain Technologies at University College London’s Computer Science Department.

Alex Murray’s research focuses on developing theoretical frameworks to explain how entrepreneurs mobilize resources from distributed resource providers and how distributed resource providers use novel technologies to coordinate resource allocations. He addresses empirical and theoretical puzzles stemming from the technologically-driven phenomena of crowdfunding, blockchain-based firms, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Theoretically, he contributes to the literatures on organizational theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship by unpacking how entrepreneurs obtain and maintain support from many distributed resource providers over time. Methodologically, he complements inductive field-based approaches with statistical analyses to develop novel insights and advance existing theories in intriguing ways.

Olav Sorenson is currently the Joseph Jacobs Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies, Professor of Strategy and of Sociology, and Faculty Director of the Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. His primary stream of research pertains to economic geography, focusing on how entrepreneurship influences the growth and competitiveness of regions within countries and on why some regions appear more supportive to entrepreneurs than others. In recognition for this research, Professor Sorenson received the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. In total, he has delivered more than 400 research presentations and has had more than 100 papers published on these subjects, in journals such as Science, the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, the Strategic Management Journal, and Research Policy. He serves as a Department Editor for Management Science. He has also served in editorial positions at more than a dozen other journals.

At the 2023 Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Katja Bringmann and I organized a panel symposium on Disruptive Trends in Entrepreneurial Finance Research. More specifically, in acknowledging the disruptive nature of current trends in the entrepreneurial finance literature, this panel symposium aimed to advance scholarly research by informing scholars on specific research opportunities and challenges in the field. Specifically, this panel was structured around three main themes (i) digitization as a radical financial market innovation, (ii) invigorated research opportunities in traditional VC research, and (iii) novel empirical approaches and data sources.

We have invited seven leading experts in the field who, collectively, have published over 400 papers, have almost been cited 50,000 times, and serve(d) on the editorial board of leading entrepreneurship, finance, and management journals including the Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Management Science, Small Business Economics, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking & Finance, British Journal of Management, Venture Capital, and Review of Corporate Finance. Collectively, this panel has invigorated a pronounced and interactive discussion on how to move the field forward.

Panelists (listed alphabetically)

Brian Anderson is a Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Management and Entrepreneurship Area Director at the KU School of Business. He earned his doctorate in strategic management from the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University. Anderson's research centers on strategic entrepreneurship, focusing on causal inference, measurement issues, and Bayesian treatment of the entrepreneurial orientation and strategic entrepreneurial behavior constructs. His research appears in the leading entrepreneurship and management journals, and he serves as an associate editor for strategic entrepreneurship at the Journal of Business Venturing, and on the editorial board of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. He teaches in the areas of analytics, data science, and strategy.

Cristiano Bellavitis is Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University. He is also the co-editor of Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance. His research interests cross the traditional boundaries between entrepreneurship, management, and finance disciplines. His research focuses on entrepreneurial finance, more precisely venture capital, initial coin offerings, and blockchain. He has published in peer-reviewed academic journals including Organization Science, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, British Journal of Management, Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Business Venturing Insights, among others.

Douglas Cumming, J.D., Ph.D., CFA, is the DeSantis Distinguished Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at the College of Business, Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. Douglas has published over 195 articles in leading refereed academic journals in finance, management, and law and economics, such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of International Business Studies. His work has been cited over 23,000 times according to Google Scholar. He is the Managing Editor-in-Chief of the Review of Corporate Finance (2021-current) and British Journal of Management (2020-current). Douglas has published 21 academic books, including Crowdfunding: Fundamental Cases, Facts, and Insights (Elsevier Academic Press, 2019). Douglas’ work has been reviewed in numerous media outlets, including The Economist, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker.

Will Drover is Associate Professor and Department Chair at the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department at the Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University. His teaching and research primarily focus on the area of new venture finance. Professor Drover’s research has been published in numerous leading peer-reviewed journals and has been featured by outlets such as Forbes and the National Venture Capital Association. He also is a field editor for the Journal of Business Venturing. Professor Drover has delivered several invited talks, including the keynote address at one of the world’s largest symposiums for startup investors at Microsoft in Silicon Valley. Drover has led four innovation-based consulting projects for the U.S. State Department. He is also an instructor for the U.S. Department of Defense via IVMF, regularly teaching innovation courses on international military bases. Professor Drover is an active investor in early-stage startups, focusing on robotics, software, biotechnology, among others. Drover is an avid kiteboarder, wakeboarder, and 10-time triathlete. Drover was also a pole vaulter at the University of Missouri.

Sofia Johan, Ph.D., earned her first degree in Law from the University of Liverpool and her LLM in International Economic Law from the University of Warwick, both in England. After working for several years in the financial markets, she returned to academia and earned her Ph.D. in Law and Economics from Tilburg University in The Netherlands. Her areas of expertise and research interest include legal and ethical issues in financial markets, entrepreneurial finance, and regulation of financial markets around the world. Dr. Johan is the author of three books and more than 72 articles in refereed journals. Her research has appeared in such leading journals as the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Oxford Review of Economics. She is a co-editor of Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance and an associate editor of the British Journal of Management. She is also Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance at University of Aberdeen and has been a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales and the University of Cambridge. She is also a PADI licensed scuba diver.

Sophie Manigart is full professor of Corporate Finance at Vlerick Business School and Ghent University. She was a guest professor at Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania), London Business School, and IE Business School (Madrid). Her research focuses on the financing of entrepreneurial enterprises, as well from the demand perspective as from the supplier perspective. In particular, she studies the interactions between business angels, venture capital investors, and entrepreneurs. Sophie’s work has been published in leading entrepreneurship and management journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Journal of Management Studies, Small Business Economics, among others. Sophie is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and Venture Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance. Until recently, she was also an associate editor at Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice. 

Ramana Nanda is a Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance and Academic Lead at the Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship at Imperial, a Research Fellow in the Financial Economics Programme of the CEPR, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School. His research examines financing frictions facing new ventures, with an aim to help entrepreneurs with fundraising and to shed light on how financial intermediaries, corporate R&D, and policy makers can improve the odds of selecting and commercializing the most promising ideas and technologies in the economy. For the academic years 2007 through 2020, Ramana was on the full-time faculty of Harvard Business School, most recently as Sarofim-Rock Professor and co-director of the Private Capital Project.  He received his Ph.D. from MIT's Sloan School of Management and has a BA and MA in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge, U.K. He is a recipient of the 2020 ERC Consolidator Grant and, 2015 Kauffman Prize Medal, that is awarded annually to one scholar under age 40 whose research has made a significant contribution to the literature in entrepreneurship. Prior to starting his Ph.D., Ramana was based in the London and New York offices of Oliver, Wyman & Company, where he worked primarily with clients in global capital markets as well as in small-business banking.  He continues to advise startup ventures on their financing strategies and also works with philanthropists and investors looking to back "deep tech" entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges.