Alexander Murray and Yoav Dubinsky

New Faculty Awards Launch to Support Academic Research

The Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship has launched a new funding opportunity to support the research activities of Lundquist College of Business faculty.

The funds will support applied research, as well as efforts to highlight academic research to non-academic audiences. Examples of funding applications include creating teaching cases based on a faculty member’s research or rewriting an academic publication in easy-to-understand language for popular media outlets.

“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. “The guiding principle behind these funds is that they serve to connect academic research to an audience that might not normally encounter it.”

The inaugural funding cycle, which began October 30, included proposals by assistant professor of management Alex Murray and sports business instructor Yoav Dubinsky. They were both granted Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship Applied Research Awards.

Murray will write a teaching case based on his recent work on deep bilateral learning. The paper builds on his recent Organization Science publication, written with coauthors Suresh Kotha and Greg Fisher, entitled “Community-Based Resource Mobilization: How Entrepreneurs Acquire Resources from Distributed Non-Professionals via Crowdfunding.”

Murray’s original research addresses how entrepreneurs learn effective resource mobilization actions, and the comparative teaching case will examine the learning behaviors used by the founders in his study, the impact of such learning on actions used in their fundraising campaigns, and, ultimately, the campaign’s resource mobilization outcomes.

Dubinsky will rewrite his recent publication, “Sport-Tech Diplomacy: Exploring the Intersections between the Sport-Tech Ecosystem, Innovation, and Diplomacy in Israel,” into more accessible language for a popular media outlet. The original research, which was published in Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, focuses on two main issues:

  1. The roles of sports, technology, and innovation in Isreal’s branding of itself as the “Startup Nation” and in the country’s public diplomacy.
  2. Coins the term “sport-tech diplomacy” to refer to using the sport-technology ecosystem for public diplomacy purposes.

The proposed article will focus on the sports-tech ecosystem in Israel and on the different uses of sports technologies by private companies, private citizens, and public authorities for diplomatic and nation branding purposes.

These awards build on multiple efforts the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship has engaged in over the years to promote academic research. Other initiatives include cofounding and supporting the annual West Coast Research Symposium on Technology Entrepreneurship, the world’s premier technology-entrepreneurship research conference; underwriting campus-wide access to the Pitchbook database, which provides unique access to venture capital, merger and acquisition data, and private equity; and, most recently, coordinating the inaugural Lundquist College of Business Research Slam event.

—Kate Harmon, Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship