Extract

Sankaran (Venkat) Venkataraman Dino, Rich: Ladies and gentlemen, our first keynote of the 2009 Entrepreneurship Exemplars Research Conference and recipient of the 2008 Foundational Paper IDEA Award, Professor Venkat Venkataraman. Venkataraman, Venkat: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here. It’s a great honor, first of all, to receive the Inaugural Award. It’s also a great privilege to be chosen to be a speaker at the Exemplars Conference, and for that I am grateful. But I’ll also say this: I’m honestly very nervous because as I look around the room I find so many distinguished people that, frankly, I feel somewhat inadequate. I would like to thank Rich Dino for the invitation to come here and present to you folks. I’d like to thank Ron Mitchell for the initiative that he has started on behalf of the Academy of Management, and Dean Earley for providing the funding and the actual political license to pull this off. I’m sure you folks had a lot of people in the background helping you to eventually let me come here, stand here in front of you and start the process. For that, I’m grateful to you all. Rich Dino gave me two suggestions in terms of what I should cover in this talk. The first topic, he said, was ‘Just tell us how you got here in terms of how you got some of those papers into the top journals of the field. Just tell your story.’ The second charter he gave me was...