---
id: "pisquared:interview/alvarez-sharon"
type: "Pi-Squared interview"
title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Sharon Alvarez"
url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/alvarez-sharon"
date: "2025-12-22"
people: ["Anita McGahan","Sharon Alvarez"]
summary: "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..."
recording: "https://vimeo.com/1148705749"
source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change"
licence: "none stated"
---

# Anita McGahan in conversation with Sharon Alvarez

Sharon Alvarez, Tom W. Olofson Chair in Entrepreneurship, Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh · 22 December 2025

## About the guest

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?”

## Related resources

- [Sharon’s University webpage](https://www.business.pitt.edu/professors/sharon-alvarez/)
- [Sharon’s Google Scholar page](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tdEfD-8AAAAJ&hl=en)
- [Sharon’s paper with Jay Barney on creation of opportunity as a counterpoint to discovery of opportunity](https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sej.4)
- [Sharon’s award-winning Academy of Management Review paper](https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.2019.0077)

## Recording

Video: https://vimeo.com/1148705749

## Category

[Where Do We Go From Here?](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/where-next)

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Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/alvarez-sharon · Licence: none stated