PhD Courses in Denmark

Course coordinator: José Mata, Department of Strategy and Innovation (SI)

Faculty
Orsola Garofalo (OG), Associate Professor
Department of Strategy and Innovation (SI), CBS

Ulrich Kaiser (UK), Professor
Department of Strategy and Innovation (SI), CBS

Francesco de Lorenzo (FdL), Associate Professor
Department of Strategy and Innovation (SI), CBS

Professor José Mata (JM), Professor
Department of Strategy and Innovation (SI), CBS

Ali Mohammadi (AM), Associate Professor
Department of Strategy and Innovation, CBS

Toke Reichstein (TR), Professor
Department of Strategy and Innovation, CBS

Vera Rocha (VR), Associate Professor
Department of Strategy and Innovation, CBS

Prerequisites
Participants are expected to have basic knowledge of entrepreneurship, innovation theory, economics, and quantitative research methods such as econometrics and experiments. A basic understanding of core theories of organizations, strategic management, and the economic theory of the firm will be helpful but not mandatory. This is one of the specialized courses offered to SI doctoral students at CBS and is open to all Ph.D. students outside the department.

Aim
The main goal of the course is to increase familiarity with and develop an in-depth understanding of the key themes and empirical research methods of entrepreneurship. Emphasis will be put on empirical applications to test theories. Most of the course will be devoted to teaching how to do empirical research in the domain of entrepreneurship, broadly defined. Focus will be on the contributions making use of quantitative methods and data including experiments. Theories, frameworks, concepts, and controversies that collectively form the foundation for entrepreneurship research will be discussed. 

The course will aim to build capabilities in critically discussing and developing research questions/projects in entrepreneurship. Students will get acquainted with various methodological approaches employed in the field and learn to analytically review and evaluate academic articles from a diverse body of literature relevant to entrepreneurship research.

Course content
Entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary research area with contributions from economics, psychology, sociology, geography, and management, just to mention a few. No other subject has attracted more scholarly, managerial, and policy attention than the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in recent years. From macro- and microeconomics to demography and organizational sociology, from finance and business studies to cognitive psychology, the quest for understanding its antecedents, sources, processes, and consequences has produced a large, vibrant, eclectic field. And with the growing advent of cross-disciplinary, multi-level work employing specialized panel data sets and more rigorous econometric techniques, initial concerns that the field lacked “a professional identity defined by a unifying theory” have abated.

The magnitude of academic interest in entrepreneurship is not surprising given its centrality for several key outcomes. Entrepreneurship has long been considered an engine of economic growth and regional development. Entrepreneurs have been shown to destroy established organizational competencies, shape evolutionary trajectories of technologies, cause substantial regulatory changes and create, enact and obliterate social topologies, organizational forms, markets, and industries. They have been placed at the heart of the theories of income inequality, social mobility, social welfare, and ethnic absorption, and they have been acknowledged to be a critical driver of the flow and distribution of resources across physical space. Research has also associated entrepreneurial acts with firm growth and performance, organizational revival, and global corporate expansion.

Foundations of Entrepreneurship is designed to offer an integrative view of how to do research to better understand why only some individuals but not others choose to become entrepreneurs, why only some persons but not others discover opportunities and exploit them, and why and how eventually only some ventures succeed and have a positive impact in society. The course has a focus on quantitative methodologies, including methods for analyzing large administrative datasets, publicly available business registers, and experimental methods.

Format
Lectures, student presentations, paper discussions, literature critiques.

The course will be taught in a concentrated format from March 10 - March 13 with one session in the morning and another in the afternoon. At the end of the course, students will prepare a term paper that will be presented and discussed in a workshop to take place on April 7. This final workshop will be held in a hybrid format, so that students who are not in the Copenhagen area may participate remotely.

Lecture plan
March 10 (9:00 - 12:00) – Organizational Heritage and Entrepreneurs (TR)
March 10 (13:00 - 16:00) – Experiments in Entrepreneurship (OG)
March 11 (9:00 - 12:00) – Entrepreneurship and Personnel (VR)
March 11 (13:00- 16:00) – Women and Immigrant Entrepreneurship (VR and JM)
March 12 (9:00 - 12:00) – Entrepreneurial Finance – theories and supply (AM)
March 12 (13:00 - 16:00) – Entrepreneurial Finance – demand (AM)
March 13 (9:00 - 12:00) – Corporates-Startups interactions (FdL)
March 13 (13:00 - 16:00) – High-frequency data and entrepreneurship research (UK)
March 31 - (no lecture) – Hand-in of the term paper
April 7 (9:00 - 16:00) – Presentation and discussion of term papers (TBD)

Learning objectives
The course is organized around interactive lectures on specific topics. Professors will primarily discuss their own research to emphasize research strategies and challenges. Students are expected to prepare presentations and to actively participate in class discussion. Altogether, we make sure that a set of important topics is discussed and that classic contributions to the literature around these focal themes are included in the course as well. 

During the course, students will have the opportunity to develop a short research paper (or a research proposal) on a topic of their choice within the field of entrepreneurship. In any of the cases, there should be developed a brief conceptual part (introduction, theory, and hypotheses). The (tentative) data and the methodology should also be discussed. The difference between a paper and a research proposal is that in the research proposal, the actual empirical application has not been done yet. Consequently, in the latter, the discussion and presentation of results will not be included. As a guideline, the final assignment should be about 5-6 pages long. The last session of the course will be run as a series of parallel workshops in which students will have the opportunity to present their papers/proposals, which will then be discussed by fellow students and by a faculty member.

Exam
Assessment will be “pass/no-pass” based on the paper/proposal submitted and presented at the end of the course.

Course Literature
Down load the list of course literature