Featured research articles on entrepreneurship
Toby Stuart on innovation at work: social networks and corporate strategy
Ulrike Malmendier on the effect of entrepreneurial peers on becoming an entrepreneur
Ross Levine on the characteristics of entrepreneurs
John Morgan on the drivers of entrepreneurship
Faculty Director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program
Professor Toby Stuart
The entrepreneurship research program at Berkeley-Haas and the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program is led by Professor Toby Stuart, who also serves as the Leo Helzel Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, as well as the Faculty Director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program. Previously, he was a Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and an Arthur J. Samberg Professor of Leadership and Strategy at Columbia Business School.
Stuart’s research focuses on social networks, venture capital networks, and the role of networks in the creation of new firms. He is the recipient of the 2007 Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship, granted every other year to recognize an individual’s contributions to entrepreneurship research. Stuart also received the Administrative Science Quarterly’s Scholarly Contribution (best paper) award.
Stuart says one of his goals is to develop the curriculum’s aim to teach students to think like entrepreneurs regardless of their fields. “Even if they don’t plan to launch a startup company, students can learn how to use innovation to strengthen organizations in any field,” says Stuart.
In 1995, Prof. Stuart earned his Ph.D. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He received his A.B., summa cum laude, in economics from Carleton College in 1989.
Read an interview about Professor Stuart’s work at Berkeley-Haas:
//haas.berkeley.edu/groups/pubs/berkeleyhaas/winter2013/building-startup-ecosystem-toby-stuart.html
Read about the Silicon Valley Immersive experience for the MBA for Executives Class:
Selected Papers and Publications
- “Board interlocks and the propensity to be targeted in PE-backed take privates” (with Soojin Yim). Journal of Financial Economics, 2010.
- “The impact of academic patenting on the rate and direction of (public) research output” (with Pierre Azoulay and Waverly Ding). Journal of Industrial Economics, 2009.
- “The evolution of venture capital investment networks” (with Olav Sorenson). Administrative Science Quarterly, 2008.
- “Brokerage in a Vertical Alliance Network” (with Salih Ozdemir and Waverly Ding). Research Policy, 2007.
- “Network effects in the governance of strategic alliances” (with David Robinson). Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2007.
Other Honors and Awards
• Elected to Sociological Research Association, 2009
• University of Southern California’s Grief Award for Research Impact for paper in Entrepreneurship, 2008
• Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship, 2006
• Administrative Science Quarterly’s Award for Scholarly Contribution, 2006
• Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, Columbia Business School, 2004
• NSF Research Grant, 2003
• Voted “outstanding faculty member” by MBA students in Business Week’s Guide to the Best Business Schools, 2001
• Research grants from the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998
• FMC Scholar, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, 1997
• State Farm Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 1994
• Doctoral Program Merit Scholarship, Stanford University, 1992
• Awarded stipend to participate in Stanford Seminar on Social Theory, 1992
• National Doctoral Fellowship, AACSB, 1991
• Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, Carleton College, 1989
• Unanimous distinction on senior thesis, Carleton College, 1989
• A.M. Harrison Prize awarded to outstanding economics major, Carleton College, 1989
Featured research articles on entrepreneurship
Toby Stuart on innovation at work: social networks and corporate strategy
Toby Stuart
Toby Stuart, with Adam Kleinbaum, “Inside the Black Box of Corporate Staff: Social Networks and the implementation of Corporate Strategy“, Strategic Management Journal, 2014
Using email analysis, Toby Stuart and coauthors examine empirically the impact of corporate staff in implementing corporate strategy in multidivisional firms. They finds sharp cross-sectional differences in communication patterns: corporate staff have larger, more integrative networks, with larger structural holes. However, much of the difference is due to a sorting process rather than being caused by employment in the corporate staff. Further, once people receive the corporate imprimatur, they retain aspects of it even when they move back to the line organization. The results imply that the emphasis on structure as a mean to achieve coordination undervalues a selection process in which individuals with broad networks match to coordination-focused jobs in the corporate staff. This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that the primary means to implement a coordination-based corporate strategy is through the formal structure of the corporate center alone.
Ulrike Malmendier on the effect of entrepreneurial peers on becoming an entrepreneur
Ulrike Malmendier
Ulrike Malmendier and Josh Lerner, “With a Little Help from my Random Friends: Success and Failure in post Business School Entrepreneurship“. Review of Financial Studies, 2013.
Ulrike Malmendier and her coauthors made the startling discovery that close acquaintance with entrepreneurs does not motivate people to become entrepreneurs themselves. Studying the records of 6,000 Harvard Business School students who are randomly assigned to class sections, they show that a higher share of entrepreneurial peers reduces, rather than increases, entrepreneurship after graduation. The decrease is driven by a decrease in unsuccessful entrepreneurial ventures, while the effect on successful ventures is significantly more positive. The results are consistent with peer learning, where the close ties between students in a section lead to an enhanced understanding of the merits of proposed business ideas.
Ross Levine on the characteristics of entrepreneurs
Ross Levine
Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein “Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Does it Pay?” Working Paper, 2014
In the first study to disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated, Levine and his co-author are able to examine the characteristics of entrepreneurs. They find that the incorporated self-employed (entrepreneurs) have a distinct combination of cognitive, noncognitive, and family traits. Besides tending to be white, male, and come from higher-income families with better-educated mothers, the incorporated–as teenagers–typically scored higher on learning aptitude tests, had greater self-esteem, and engaged in more aggressive, illicit, risk-taking activities. The combination of smart and illicit tendencies as a youth accounts for both entry into entrepreneurship and the comparative earnings of entrepreneurs. In contrast to a large literature, they also find that entrepreneurs earn much more per hour than their salaried counterparts.
John Morgan on the drivers of entrepreneurship
John Morgan
John Morgan and Dana Sisak “Entrepreneurship and Loss Aversion in a Winner-Take All Society”. Working Paper 2014.
John Morgan and co-author investigate what motivates entrepreneurs to give up the safety of employment for the hazards of entrepreneurship. They describe entrepreneurs as those who work at running corner stores, beauty salons, real estate brokerages, and ethnic restaurants, up to well-known large success stories such as Facebook. They note that most ventures stay small, but some make it big. Their model explains this pattern through the variation in the outside—employment wage—option. In their model all individuals have the same characteristics, including being loss-averse: thus, a rise in employment wages increases entrepreneurial investment and effort, and also raises returns.