The Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship has awarded its second cycle of funding to support Lundquist College of Business faculty in their research activities. Inaugurated in fall 2020, Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship Applied Research Awards provide small grants to support translational faculty research, as well as efforts to highlight academic research to nonacademic audiences. Examples of funding applications include creating teaching cases based on a faculty member’s research or rewriting an academic publication for popular media outlets.

The second funding cycle saw grants awarded to assistant professor of management Lauren Lanahan and PhD candidate Nathan Warren.

Lanahan will write two articles to support the dissemination of her recent research via The Conversation, a nonprofit independent news organization that distributes informative articles written by academic experts for the general public. These respective articles will focus on the following aspects of her research:

• The role of certifications on venture performance as highlighted in her forthcoming paper in Organization Science titled “Inappropriateness Penalty, Desirability Premium: What Do More Certifications Actually Signal?” In this paper, Lanahan and coauthors examine why ventures seek certifications even though the benefits of certifications can have costs that hamper venture performance. These findings have policy implications within the empirical settings of the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The authors’ findings provide compelling evidence that some firms receiving multiple SBIR grants are producing more transformative innovations involving broad experimentation that requires more certifications and more effort to prove out.
   
• The role of public research and development (R&D) funding on early-career innovation highlighted in two papers in which Lanahan is coauthor: “Gender Discrepancies in Research Productivity of High-Performing Life Science Graduate Students” in Research Policy and “‘The Impact of Federal R&D Funding Across the Academy: An Analysis of Early-Career Research Productivity,” forthcoming in Research Policy. These studies are part of an National Science Foundation grant that examine the effect of R&D expenditures directed toward emerging researchers (individuals at an earlier point in their career during graduate training). The development and support of graduate students has important implications for the advancement of science broadly, as well as significant policy implications.

Warren will translate his research paper, “Who’s in Control? How Default Tip Levels Influence Customer Response,” for the Marketing Science Institute’s Working Paper Series, which has that mission to connect scholars and practitioners. Warren’s research examines the influence of different default tip suggestions on customer responses. His research finds that if a coffee shop provides customers with lower default tip suggestions (for example, 5, 10, and 15 percent), customers tip less on average but are significantly more satisfied and more likely to return to the business. Warren’s research was recently selected as a winner of the Organization of Frontline Research young scholar competition.

Finally, instructor of sports business Yoav Dubinsky, who received a Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship Applied Research Award in fall 2020, saw his “Sport-Tech Diplomacy: The Case of Israel” write-up recently published on the GeoSport platform developed by IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques) and Emlyon Business School in France.

Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship Applied Research grants are just one of several ways that the center supports academic research on a continual basis.

“We believe that centers like ours ideally support three core activities—teaching, research and outreach—and a center is stronger when these activities are intertwined rather than siloed,” said Andrew Nelson, Randall C. Papé Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the academic director of the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship.

—Kate Harmon, Program Manager and Director of Cross-Campus Engagement, Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship