University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
My teaching interests center on innovation, strategy, and organization design. The courses listed below are currently being taught. In addition to the courses below, I have also developed and taught courses on Organization Design, Innovation Strategy, Technology Strategy, and the Theoretical Foundations of Entrepreneurship (doctoral seminar), as well as executive education sessions focusing on innovation and strategy.
This course is intended for a variety of students who have an interest in entrepreneurship. We will begin the course by exploring how entrepreneurship emerges from and shapes the world around us. We'll then discuss frameworks for vetting, evaluating, and developing potential business ideas. We'll then dive into the "nuts and bolts" of building a business. Finally, we'll consider how and when entrepreneurship might fit in the course of your career.
Social science research draws from a variety of methodological traditions. In this course we will examine how scholarship can benefit from qualitative inquiry, fieldwork and historical methods. We will examine how to effectively use these methods, as well as how to design mixed-methods approaches (e.g., using fieldwork to guide and contextualize or understand findings from archival research). Course participants will read both methodological and illustrative pieces from the literature, and gain experience hand-collecting data from primary and secondary sources.
Not only do the rules and norms of institutions and organizations shape innovative outcomes, but innovators also shape and create institutions and organizations. In this course, we will examine both sides of this dynamic, with an overall focus on understanding the social and economic precursors and consequences of innovation. We will read broadly, drawing on both foundational works (e.g., North, Rosenberg, Kline & Pinch), as well as more recent work examining these dynamics in the digital age (e.g., work on open source software, community-based innovation, and makerspaces).
This course is intended for students interested in strategy formulation and implementation. You will be introduced to – and learn to apply - a number of frameworks and theories that will enable you to understand and analyze the factors that affect organizations’ long-run performance and to provide you with the tools to advise organizations on how they can improve. BA 449 is part of the undergraduate core curriculum for business school students.