Babson’s 39th BCERC and my 3rd

It was great being there at the 39th Babson College Entrepreneurship Research [image error]Conference (BCERC) earlier this month. It was my third time at the BCERC and it was special for two additional reasons: (i) it was my first visit to the Babson College at Wellesley, MA and (ii) it was Babson College’s Centennial year.

I represented Nord University Business School. We were four colleagues at the BCERC 2019. Since we landed into Boston early, we spent our day visiting MIT’s Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and Harvard’s Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. It was great knowing both these centers and what they do for promoting entrepreneurship on their campuses. At Harvard Business School we also had [image error]a great lunch and spent time absorbing the intellectual air at the famed Baker Library.

The conference began with the Welcome reception! It felt like an annual reunion of sorts. It felt like being home with so many familiar faces. The socials during the conference gave us enough time to catch up with old friends and make new ones. We rubbed shoulders with the who-is-who in the world of entrepreneurship research. I interacted with Alexander McKelvie, Frederic Delmar, Andrew Corbett, Phillip Kim, Candida Brush among others. It was such a pleasure meeting my 2016 BCERC Doctoral Consortium cohort mates. It was nice to chat about how our careers have shifted and progressed – some assistant professors and a few postdocs.[image error]

All of us presented our papers at the conference. We received feedback on our work. The general learning about scholarship was reiterated and remains valid: work on interesting research questions; be rigorous with methods and reporting; ask those before you for help; get friendly reviews; never submit a first draft to a journal; read exemplars; learn the craft by co-working with seniors. During this year’s conference I noticed: fsQCA was on more papers than I had seen before and more global representation of scholars (including one from India).

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The Boston weather was conducive for great discussions and long walks. Overall it was a great conference. I now look forward to the next BCERC at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.