Getting Elected to High Office in the Biggest Academic Group… gulp! ;)
By: Norris Krueger, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Management and Entrepreneurship
By far, the Academy of Management (AoM) is the largest and most active professional association for management scholars and educators. The fast-growing Entrepreneurship Division (ENT) is the fifth-largest subgroup and (delightfully) one of the most diverse.
It is my honor and privilege to be a newly-elected officer to the Division’s Executive Committee. It is so good to realize how much I am liked and respected. My title is representative-at-large which means I have considerable scope as to my duties and my opportunities to grow the members. For the next three years, I will be identifying and implementing these opportunities. But I need your help – ENT truly believes in vox populi!
Why does this matter to the School of Advanced Studies and the University of Phoenix?
These officer positions are typically celebrated by their affiliations who love this recognition as validation for the quality of their programs and their people. In return, schools provide support for the officers’ travel to AoM conferences, etc. Moreover, being an officer affords me the chance to advance an agenda that both indirectly and directly delivers value to my affiliations. Like SAS and UOPX!
Directly, I have a bully pulpit to encourage members to get more involved in organizations like AoM and to get more involved in more (and higher-level) research. I have already started by reaching out to all the members of CME and of my SIG, Innovation Creativity & Entrepreneurship. I want to share the benefits of great involvement in organizations, conferences and publishing opportunities!
Indirectly, one issue that is already on my plate is to make the ENT Division more practitioner-friendly. Not just welcoming to practitioners but encouraging the highest quality of practitioner-useful research. There is strong grassroots support in the Division for this but they want to learn more about how to do it. We can contribute mightily! I am leading an effort to generate and disseminate grade-A policy-friendly work; this will build on this. [This includes a book series…hint, hint ;) ]
Even if you are not in a business center like CME, this election opens some pretty interesting doors for contributing to highly relevant research. One of the areas I’m working in is impact assessment of entrepreneurship/innovation learning programs… there is much that our education colleagues can contribute! Ditto for anyone working on organization-level research.
This is a golden opportunity to develop cross-center collaborations!
How has your Research Center or Special Interest Group leveraged its affiliates to develop cross-center collaborations?
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p.s. and share what you're doing that you are proud of or totally psyched about! In the entrepreneurship/innovation academic world, once in a while it''s ok to swag a little - so share a little shameless self-promotion!