2016 Inaugural AMA Entrepreneurial Marketing SIG/Kauffman

Doctoral Dissertation Award Winner

This is the first year that AMA Entrepreneurial Marketing Special Interest Group (EM SIG)) and Kauffman foundation are seeking outstanding doctoral dissertation work in the marketing-entrepreneurship interface to promote quality research in the field of entrepreneurial marketing. This new annual award has been made possible by the generous support of Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

This year we received eligible submissions from New Zealand, Spain, Germany, Netherlands and the USA. After the selection committee’s thorough review and evaluation of all the submissions, we are very pleased to announce:

Winner: Dr. Srinivas Venugopal

Dissertation Title: Entrepreneurial Marketing in Subsistence Marketplaces

Degree Granting Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Department of Marketing

Doctoral Committee: Madhubalan Viswanathan, Rajagopal Echambadi, Joseph Mahoney, Cele Otnes, Aric Rindfleisch

Abstract: There are more than a billion poverty-stricken entrepreneurs in the world who run micro-enterprises to meet basic consumption needs. Being a consumer and being an entrepreneur are fundamentally intertwined in the fabric of their economic lives – a condition of life captured in the term ‘consumer-entrepreneur duality’. The first part of this dissertation aims to provide a theoretical foundation for the notion of consumer-entrepreneur duality and test its implications empirically. A key import of the aforementioned duality is that factors in the consumption domain can impact important outcomes in the entrepreneurial domain and vice versa.

Local communities in subsistence marketplaces across the world are increasingly facing threats to their ability in meeting basic needs. In response, these communities are left in a position of changing the very institutions that have historically guided their collective behaviors and community life. The second part of this dissertation examines the process through which marketing enterprises enable local communities to effect institutional change. I theorize the notion of facilitated institutional entrepreneurship – defined as the process in which an external organization, originating in a different institutional context, acts as an enabler of embedded agency on the part of local subsistence communities.

 

 

Runner-up: Dr. Simone Wies

Dissertation Title: The Stock Market Dynamics of Marketing Decision-Making

Degree Granting Institution: Masstricht University, The Netherlands, Department of Finance

Doctoral Committee: Joost M.E. Pennings, Arvid O.I. Hoffmann, Christine Moorman, Roger Meuwissen, Piet Eichholtz

Abstract: Public equity markets play a critical role in providing entrepreneurial firms access to financial capital. At the same time, however, external equity financing involves a separation of ownership and control as the entrepreneur sells shares to outside investors not involved in managing the firm. In my dissertation, I argue that this separation of ownership and control has implications of how firms pursue their marketing strategies, in particular their innovation strategies. First, I examine the feedback loop of shareholder behavior into innovation efforts. I find that going public makes firms increase their level of innovations but reduce the innovativeness of these new product introductions. I also show that shareholder complaints incentivize firms to alter their marketing and R&D investments in an effort to manage stock market expectations. Second, I examine how investors understand and incorporate marketing information in pricing firm stock. I find that insider trading serves as signal of the commercial viability of new product introductions, conditional on alternative signals.  Because of the economic importance that stock market financing, especially in the early stages of the firm’s life cycle, and firm marketing strategies enjoy, I argue that addressing these two dynamics is essential for our understanding of today’s entrepreneurial business paradigm.

 

Selection Committee of 2016 AMA EMSIG/Kauffman Doctoral Dissertation Award:

Yinghong Susan Wei (Chair), Texas A&M International University

Abdul Ali, Babson College

Kelli M. Frias, Texas Tech University

2017 Application Deadline:

Please submit your application for next year’s dissertation award to AMA EMSIG Chair (Can Uslay: can.uslay@business.rutgers.edu) or the Award Committee Chair (Susan Wei: susanwei.yinghong@gmail.com) by May 31, 2017.

The winner will receive a cash prize of $3,000 (US Dollar) plus free travel to attend Global Research Symposium on Marketing and Entrepreneurship (GRSME) (http://www.marketing-entrepreneurship.org/) and the AMA Summer Educators’ Conference (up to maximum expense of $2,000).