UA Business School Team Receives Major Awards for Research on Entrepreneurship

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – A team of faculty members from the Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration at The University of Alabama has won two major awards for research and publishing in entrepreneurship.

“This is a very significant achievement,” said Dr. Walter S. Misiolek, professor of economics and interim dean of the College. “Entrepreneurship embodies the principals of organization, management and risk and is a cornerstone of the American economy. For our faculty members to be recognized by their peers for excellence in this area is further evidence of the strength of our faculty.”

Authors of both papers were Patrick Kreiser, a doctoral student at UA, Dr. Louis Marino, assistant professor of strategic management at UA, and Dr. K. Mark Weaver, former professor of management at UA, currently at Rowan University.

The first award was the Michael H. Mescon Best Empirical Paper Award in the Entrepreneurship Division presented by the Academy of Management for 2002. Between 250 and 300 papers were submitted from around the world.

The Mescon award was for a paper titled, “Reassessing the Environment-EO Link: The Impact of Environmental Hostility on the Dimensions of Entrepreneurial Orientation.”

“The primary focus of the study was to answer the question of how small to medium sized enterprises with between five and 500 employees respond to challenging external conditions,” Marino said. “To examine this question, we used a sample of almost 1,700 firms across eight countries to explore the relationship between the state of the external environment and a firm’s propensity to employ entrepreneurial strategies.

“We found that as resources become increasingly scarce and the external environment becomes more hostile, small to medium sized companies become less innovative. Further, the study showed that those firms were most likely to take risks in environments seen as having moderate levels of available resources, and less likely to take risks in environments that were seen to have either an abundance of resources or a very low level of available resources.”

The second award is the Stevens Institute of Technology Wesley J. Howe Award for Excellence in Research on the Topic of Corporate Entrepreneurship. The award was presented by the Babson College/Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurship Research Conference, the foremost entrepreneurship conference in the world.

“It is a commonly held belief that entrepreneurial firms will outperform more conservative organizations,” Marino said. “In this study we examined more than 1,500 firms representing nine countries to see if entrepreneurial firms — those that are more innovative, proactive and willing to take risks – indeed outperformed more conservative firms in terms of satisfaction with sales levels, sales growth and profitability.

“The study found that firms that were highly innovative and proactive performed better than those that were less innovative and proactive, but that firms with a moderate willingness to take risks performed worse than either firms who were the least willing to take risks or those who were the most willing. External environments that we characterized as having abundant resources and those that were seen as rapidly changing both enhanced the relationships between a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance.”

The annual Babson College-Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BKERC) is the premier scholarly forum for entrepreneurial research in the world. It is sponsored jointly by Babson College and the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Founded by Babson in 1981, the Entrepreneurship Research Conference was established to provide a venue where academicians and real-world practitioners could link theory and practice. Each year, the conference attracts more than 200 entrepreneurial scholars who come to hear the presentations of more than 140 papers. Nine reviewers select the 40 best papers for publication in “Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research” and the best paper submissions are presented with cash awards.

The Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration, which was founded in 1919, began offering graduate education in 1923. The undergraduate business school is 45th nationally in the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings.