Department of Strategy and Innovation

In the current economy, entrepreneurship is a crucial activity not only for the risk-taking founders of new companies but for most participants in a modern economy. Many fewer people are now employed in jobs where workers’ abilities, such as physical power, endurance, or precision, are directed by superiors. In modern economies, most employees constantly need to make decisions about their job functions. This tends to erase the distinction between the entrepreneur - as the founder of companies - and the ‘ordinary’ man and widens the need for entrepreneurial skills to now also include a major part of the employees.

With this in mind, it is no wonder that entrepreneurship is now on everybody’s mind. The promotion of entrepreneurship has become a top priority in most societies. Education of the citizens to take on personal responsibilities of the entrepreneurial kind, as business founders or as idea generators or creative problem solvers in existing organizations, is on the agenda of all educational institutions. In addition, research on phenomena such as university spin-offs, serial entrepreneurship, venture capital, social entrepreneurship, personal traits of entrepreneurs, organizational creativity, and public support of start-ups, are all receiving growing interest from academic researchers.

Facts about the Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship

The donation covers funding for the Chair, PhD and postdoctoral positions at CBS as well as support for research activities. The donation will be running until 2028 at which point the area will be an integrated part of CBS with a number of tenured positions.

The first Chair was Professor Mirjam van Praag, who took on the position as Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller Professor on January 1 2014. In March 2021, Mirjam van Praag returned to the Netherlands to take up a position as President of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

Since February 2021, the Chair has been held by Professor José Mata. His research focuses on the dynamics of firms and markets. He has studied the processes by which new venture firms are created and enter new markets, grow, and eventually exit. José Mata has studied these topics both in a domestic as well as in an international context and he has recently begun studying entrepreneurship by immigrants. For more information about José Mata go to his website in the area of the Department of Strategy and Innovation.

Research under the Chair
The focus of the research program of the Chair is to understand the origins of entrepreneurial organizations, their strategies and their implications for the organizations and society.

The program investigates topics such as: What leads individuals to create new ventures? What makes some existing organizations more entrepreneurial than others? Which strategies do people and organizations adopt to become entrepreneurial? What are the implications of the strategies adopted for the success of the ventures? What are the implications of the presence of such organizations for society?

A diverse set of factors are considered to answer the questions above, in particular: The contribution of abilities/capabilities for entrepreneurship and the extent to which these are innate and how they are developed; the geographical origins of people and organizations and their impact upon entrepreneurship, namely the forces affecting the creation of new ventures abroad and entrepreneurship by immigrants; the constraints affecting entrepreneurial organizations and the strategies followed by them to engage resources in their ventures, namely in terms of mobilizing funds, but also employees, and founding and managerial teams.

The analysis relies mostly on empirical methods, namely on the analysis of: large-scale microdata sets, in particular the excellent Danish micro-data; experiments, both in the laboratory and the field; other types of primary data like own surveys and of secondary data collected by third parties.