Sharon Alvarez is the Tom W. Olofson Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. A recipient of countless best paper awards and honors for her scholarship, Sharon recently served as the...

Sharon Alvarez is the Tom W. Olofson Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. A recipient of countless best paper awards and honors for her scholarship, Sharon recently served as the President of the Academy of Management. Her work explores how entrepreneurs carve out the opportunities that they pursue under extensive uncertainty about what is possible. She’s known particularly for demonstrating that entrepreneurial opportunities are not technologically determined but rather reflect the vision of those that pursue them. This means that entrepreneurs drive toward a future that may be quite different from the past in ways that make analysis of trends unreliable for understanding new opportunities for value creation. These ideas have led to extensive publications in leading journals and ultimately to Sharon’s editorial work in them. Her paper entitled “Discovery and Creation: Alternative Theories of Entrepreneurial Action” has won awards from multiple divisions of the Academy and other scholarly bodies, for example. Recently, she was awarded a best-paper recognition from the Academy of Management Review for her paper “Where do Stakeholders Come From?”