Scholars in Creativity, Innovation & Entrepreneurship Research Fund
2007 Recipients
Madhu Viswanathan
Business Administration, College of Business
Sustainable Entrepreneurship for Subsistence Marketplaces
This research focuses on sustainable consumption and production and its interrelationships with entrepreneurship in subsistence marketplaces. A number of factors that characterize the adverse conditions of subsistence marketplaces make entrepreneurship a necessity and entrepreneurial skills a natural outcome. Building on a research program on consumption and entrepreneurship across resource and literacy barriers, this proposal considers the issue of sustainability in its broadest sense, i.e., in terms of considering outcomes for the planet and people along with profits. The research will use a bottom-up approach to examine cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors among micro-entrepreneurs and the customers they serve. Sustainable solutions for a large proportion of humanity will come from an understanding of micro-level human needs and behaviors and their convergence with sustainable technologies and business practices in the arena of entrepreneurship. The role of the micro-entrepreneur who is closest to the marketplaces in implementing sustainable solutions is likely to be critical. Such understanding of subsistence marketplaces and how they can progress toward being sustainable marketplaces would benefit all markets.
Michelle Shumate
Speech Communication, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
From Whence Do Civic and Social Organizations Come? Antecedents to Social Entrepreneurship
The third sector is growing at an unprecedented rate. However, the organizations that make up this sector, including community organizations, nongovernmental organizations, not-for-profit organizations, and sector-blurring social enterprise ventures, do not simply appear. Social entrepreneurs navigate economic, social and institutional entry barriers to establish organizations addressing a variety of societal needs. What motivates social entrepreneurs to pursue their goals, overcome obstacles, and establish organizations? The proposed research begins to answer this question by examining the context and background from which social entrepreneurs draw: a) previous experience with the social issue and/or market; b) social networks of resources, including social support, economic resources, and volunteer networks; and c) knowledge and confidence about social organization management, strategy and practices. Drawing on Austrian and evolutionary theories of entrepreneurship, the purpose of the proposed research is to generate propositions about the factors that make social opportunity information more accessible to some individuals and motivate social entrepreneurship.
Peter Nardulli
Cline Center for Democracy and Political Science,
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Economic Growth: A Global Examination
The Societal Infrastructures and Development project (SID) of the Cline Center for Democracy addresses one of the most perplexing challenges of the 21st century: How can we enhance the quality of life for people throughout the world? The Cline Center seeks to provide a knowledge base to assist practitioners in their efforts to better the human condition, as well as analytic tools and approaches that will be useful in directing and evaluating their efforts. The SID project focuses on the role of national institutional designs in fostering societal welfare. The Center has begun to gather a wide range of data on the political, economic, and legal systems of 177 nations for a time frame that extends from 1946, the end of World War II, into the indefinite future. As well, contextual data and welfare indicators are being assembled. Three institutions are at the heart of current thinking about institutional designs and social welfare: democracy, free enterprise and the rule of law. As a starting point, conceptual models for these institutions have been developed, and three research initiatives have been undertaken that use information technology to create electronic archives of organized and classified data. This additional component of the SID project seeks to extend the existing classification scheme to better capture entrepreneurship/innovation categories. A tentative scheme has been established, and the automatic text categorization program will examine a sample set of 5,000 articles in order to test its appropriateness. A later stage will then involve the examination of the larger archive with the use of the entrepreneurship/innovation categories. This project will provide a unique set of data and innovative investigative tools, for scholars at Illinois and elsewhere, to help in determining how government and economics can best interact to optimize the welfare of society as a whole.
Walter Hurley
Animal Sciences, College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences
Building Entrepreneurial Skills through Advanced Science Instruction
This project will seek to integrate entrepreneurial skill development into an advanced undergraduate science course, and to systematically monitor and document student development. The research will analyze the impact of the course on student learning about their entrepreneurial skills, and document the course model as a resource for other science courses and curricula seeking to expand student learning of these skills. The course emphasis will be on encouraging student innovation, creativity, and opportunity seeking through the inquiry process. Students will be asked to consider how real-world scientific challenges, and their own experiences with those issues, relate to the field of study, and in turn how that field can respond to these issues. Through this process students will be asked to recognize and explicitly document the opportunity, their creative thinking process, how they would manage innovation, and how they expect to articulate and sell their ideas. The documentation component will be one set of data for monitoring and documenting the course. Helping students understand this type of inquiry-based creative process will equip them with the fundamental tools associated with opportunity recognition, entrepreneurial cognition, and innovation. Skills are durable while content knowledge is often transitory. This research will address entrepreneurship as a life skill, related to strategic thinking, independence and self-sufficiency, which can be learned through the study of content.
Rhonda Hardy
Extension, College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences
Identification of New Approaches for Providing Supportive Services and Education to African American Business
A prevalent issue for small businesses in Chicago’s southeast communities is a need for direct supportive services through business retention planning. Previous research by the investigator with local elected officials, community development organizations and business chambers assessed business owners and the business environment. The planned research builds on the findings to examine business retention programming, identify actions and systems to improve business success, and suggest creative approaches for providing supportive services. Also included will be a feasibility study of a business retention incubator.
Clare H. Crowston
History, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Accounting for Rose Bertin: Credit, Fashion, and Gender in 18th Century France
This research combines a cultural history of credit, fashion, and gender with a detailed reconstruction of credit systems in the female-dominated fashion industry of 18th century France. The book under preparation takes its title from Rose Bertin, fashion merchant to Marie Antoinette and pioneering 18th century entrepreneur. The book’s aim is to illuminate the connections among culture, society and economy in this period, and the particular role women played in intertwined networks of cultural, social, and economic capital. The book first explores the cultural meanings of credit in this period. This cultural history is then combined with important economic and business developments of 18th century France. Previous research documented the emergence of a new commercial fashion industry, in which women played a central role. This industry contributed to substantial growth in French economic production and a ‘consumer revolution.’ Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this work argues that women’s access to economic credit must be understood within the rich web of power relations and influence trafficking contemporaries described as crédit. Illuminating the role of credit – and the role of women within credit systems – contributes to the ongoing reassessment of European economic development.
Damon L. Baker
Krannert Art Museum, College of Fine & Applied Arts
Digital Artists as Technology Entrepreneurs
This research proposes to study the entrepreneurial behavior of digital artists. The nature of the digital medium presents a problem for artists hoping to enter the traditional system of museum and gallery display and sale of their works: a digital artwork is transported and displayed differently than a physical work like a painting or sculpture would be; and the infinitely reproducible form of a digital work poses questions of ownership. As well, the significant specialized technical skills require for a practitioner to enter into the field are difficult to acquire through traditional means. This often leads artists to invent the genre of art they wish to practice as they go along, carving out new niches and making opportunities for themselves as changes in the technology they use modifies the cultural landscape in which their work is situated. We hypothesize that these characteristics of digital media force the digital artist into thinking – and behaving – like an entrepreneur. We take Dees’ concept of social entrepreneurship as our starting point in conceptualizing the entrepreneurial artists. By identifying and analyzing entrepreneurial behavior in digital artists through an ethnographic study of the praxis of working digital artists, we hope to broaden both the scope of entrepreneurial research and the definition of social entrepreneurship.