Lori, you’ve been studying entrepreneurship and innovation throughout your career, with insights that have culminated in your new book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurs.    Can you tell us about the journey that landed you on this book?

The books is in the popular press, and comes more from Lori’s administrative responsibilities than her scholarship, although of course there are relationships.  At Penn, there are incredible students from all over the University who have pursued a wide range of pathways into entrepreneurship.  This is about those pathways.

The list starts with disruption and the kinds of entrepreneurship that is often celebrated, but it moves toward pathways that are less well known.  These include tech commercializers who see applications for something they’ve done.  It includes starting funds for alternative investments and on different types of principles.  And it reflects acquisitions and intrapreneurship, which disseminate from established organizations.

Many of our colleagues in the field of management have done work in these areas.  Think of Rajshree Agarwal, for example.   The book pulls insights together in a framework that’s designed to be useful in broadening understanding of what entrepreneurship is.

You’ve got a really interesting new article in the Strategic Management Journal on familiar vs. novel solutions to problems.  

The article, which is joint with two former Wharton doctoral students who are now professors, looks at how biopharmaceutical firms form alliances. The goal is to understand whether they insource more familiar or novel technologies.  The results show that there is more of an emphasis on insourcing what is familiar than you might have expected.   We also look at what might lead to acquiring novel technology.

How do you map the finding from a published article to the broader terrain of generalizable insights?

Lori has been working with Dan Levinthal on the question of generalizability in our research papers.   During the pandemic, she formed a working group to consider this (of which Anita was a part).  The goal is to think about which of the findings in our papers, which are developed in a narrow setting, can support claims that apply to other situations.  Our tendency as scholars is to overgeneralize.  We’ve been trained to do that.  We want to do that.   But how can we do that systematically, accurately and responsibly?  Lori and Dan identify a range of mid-level attributes of settings that may support generalization, such as the industry context, regions, technologies, social settings, etc.  These map to three larger categories:  uncertainty, interdependence and variance.  The idea is that we can generalize within these categories (of course in ways that are qualified and supportable!).

Putting on her hat as a Vice Dean of Programs on Entrepreneurship, Lori described the challenges of teaching this topic especially given the prevalence of LLMs that deliver the “answers” to cases and other materials.

Lori emphasized that teaching is changing fast.  What does it take to support students in learning the leadership ideas that we want to inculcate in them?   Experiences.   Experiential learning.    Lori thinks of our roles as educational rather than as investing.    Our mission is to inculcate in learners a mindset for entrepreneurship and innovation and value creation.   Experiential learning means that students are working on projects.  Most may not pan out, and that’s fine.   The students benefit by practicing startups, by thinking critically, and by learning how to make things happen.

What makes Lori optimistic?  

Young people who see tremendous opportunity to do good.    And this includes undergrads, MBAs, executives in our classrooms.   This gives Lori fuel.