Mary Trispas

Associate Professor of management and orgranization, Director of the Shea Center for Entrepreneurship, and Haub Family Fellow Mary Tripsas was recently awarded the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal Best Paper Award by the Strategic Management Society for her publication, “The Accidental Entrepreneur: The Emergent and Collective Process of User Entrepreneurship,” co-authored with Sonali Shah. The article, which previously received the Thought Leader Award from the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division, highlights the important role of end-users as a source of entrepreneurial activity in industries ranging from medical devices to sporting equipment. In fact, using a sample from the juvenile products industry, the authors find that an overwhelming 80% of firms alive in 2007 were founded by users–parents, grandparents, and babysitters who experienced a need themselves, innovated to solve that need, and then saw the potential for commercializing their innovation. Tripsas and Shah propose that the combination of having a deep understanding of customer needs and being embedded in a community of users can give these “accidental” user entrepreneurs advantages over other startups.    

Eliana Crosina, a fourth year Ph.D. student in the management and organization department, was recently awarded the highly prestigious Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship by the Kauffman Foundation for her thesis work, “The Making of an Entrepreneur: Unpacking the Role of Space in Entrepreneurial Identity Development.”