Maria Minniti
Director
Maria Minniti is director of the Institute for an Entrepreneurial Society. She is also professor and the Bantle Chair in Entrepreneurship and Public Policy at the Whitman School of Management. Minniti received a Ph.D. in economics from New York University and has held permanent and visiting positions at the London Business School, Copenhagen Business School, Humboldt University, Aalto University, Southern Methodist University and the Max Planck Institute among others. She is currently an editor for the Small Business Economics Journal.
Minniti has published more than 100 academic articles, monographs and book chapters in leading entrepreneurship, management and economics publications. Her work has been featured in media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Financial Times, Forbes, and Chicago Tribune among others. Her recent research investigates entrepreneurial solutions to social problems, the relationship between entrepreneurship and institutions, and the effects of regulation on innovation. As IES director, Minniti serves as mentor for Ph.D. students and is responsible for developing IES’ academic vision. In 2020, she was listed as one of the top 2% most impactful researchers globally and across all sciences by a PLOS Biology study.
Roger Koppl
Associate Director
Roger Koppl is associate director of the Institute for an Entrepreneurial Society. He is also professor of finance in the Whitman School of Management and a faculty fellow in the University’s Forensic and National Security Sciences Institute. Kopek has published three books, edited or co-edited another 9 volumes and published over 120 academic articles and book chapters in several areas, including economics, entrepreneurial studies and forensic science.
Koppl’s research interests include the economic theory of experts, innovation and economic growth, complexity theory, and the production and distribution of knowledge in society. His work on forensic science reform has been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Forbes magazine, Reason magazine, Slate, The Huffington Post, and other outlets.
David S. Lucas
Faculty Fellow
David Lucas is faculty fellow of the Institute for an Entrepreneurial Society. He is also assistant professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises at the Whitman School of Management. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University and has received awards from the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the Association of Private Enterprise Education.
Lucas has published in Research Policy, Southern Economic Journal, Public Management Review, Journal of Business Venturing Insights, among others. His research sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship and public policy. He also studies how entrepreneurship and innovation can address social challenges like poverty. Lucas writes for popular audiences in outlets including RealClearPolicy, and has testified before Congress on the issue of homelessness.
Cameron Miller
Faculty Fellow
Cameron Miller is an associate professor of strategy. Broadly, his research interests cut across technology strategy and innovation, competitive strategy, platforms and ecosystems, and evolutionary economics. Most of his current research falls into three themes. One, how firms create and capture value in innovation ecosystems. Two, how platform owners use non-price mechanisms to govern their ecosystems. Three, various aspects of the firm’s product strategy—from the innovation of new technologies, product positioning and design when entering new markets, and the decision to abandon products. His work has appeared in leading strategy journals such as Strategic Management Journal and leading entrepreneurship journals, such as Journal of Business Venturing. He is on the editorial review board of top journals, such as Organizational Science and Strategic Management Journal. Prior to earning his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Miller was a director in the Global Fixed Income Research Department at Standard & Poor’s in New York City. Prior to that, he was a senior analyst in the Research and Analytical Development Department at The Modeling Group LLC, in Stamford, Connecticut.
David Park
Faculty Fellow
David Park is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship and IES Faculty Fellow at the Whitman School where he conducts research on entrepreneurship and strategy. His research focuses on how organizations mobilize resources from different stakeholders and resource providers specifically examining organizational leaders in various types of organizations (i.e., for-profits, nonprofits and social enterprises) from organizational inception to maturity and their influences on organizations, industries as well as society. His work has been published in top academic journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and have won numerous best paper awards from major academic conferences such as the Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society and the Korean Academic Society of Business Administration. Park has also won several teaching awards and recognitions. Poets and Quants named him the World’s 40-under-40 Best MBA professor and the top 50 undergraduate business professor. Before joining academia, he co-founded a high-tech startup. He also served as a Marine Corps officer and retired as a captain. He received his Ph.D. from Foster School of Business, University of Washington, his M.S. from Seoul National University and his bachelor’s degree from University of Seoul.
Ken Walsleben ’83 (MAX)
Faculty Fellow
Ken Walsleben is a professor of entrepreneurial practice. He is a member of Whitman’s prestigious Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises. After 30 years working in the financial industry (including the creation and 20-year management of a successful financial services firm), Walsleben joined the Whitman faculty full-time in 2014. Since then, he has been chosen by Whitman’s graduating seniors as their Professor of the Year in 2017 and 2019. He has also received Syracuse University’s prestigious Meredith Award for Teaching Excellence in 2018. He has been chosen by numerous Whitman and University student scholars as their most influential faculty member, and has accompanied them to award banquets at both the school and university level. Walsleben remains one of Whitman’s most popular professors and has done so while primarily teaching the school’s demanding Capstone course for graduating seniors. He has also created and teaches Whitman’s popular Entrepreneurial Turnarounds course for both graduate and undergraduate students. Additionally, he created and teaches Whitman’s online version of Foundations of Entrepreneurship for graduate students. Walsleben routinely assists the IES by providing instructional pedagogy leadership to Ph.D. candidates as they transition to in-class live instruction. Walsleben is a 1983 graduate of Syracuse University.
Kira Pronin
Postdoctoral Researcher
Kira Pronin is a postdoctoral researcher at the IES. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from University of Pittsburgh and a master of economics from University of Bergen in Norway. Her current research examines governmental crisis management, scientific advisory boards and institutional structures which lead to more inclusive policy-making in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Previously, Pronin conducted laboratory experiments on deliberation and majority voting in collective decision-making, as well as game theoretic and empirical research on how viewpoint and disciplinary diversity in the membership of advisory commissions can improve the quality of commission recommendations and reduce polarization. She is also a regular contributor to Australian Outlook, the online publication of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
Fabian Parada Diaz ’21 Ph.D.
Associate Fellow
Fabian Diaz is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship and a fellow of the Center for Free Enterprise at the University of Louisville. He received his Ph.D. in 2021 from the Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises at the Whitman School of Management. Prior to joining IES, Diaz earned an M.S. in economics from San Jose State University. From 2010 to 2017 he was a successful entrepreneur and worked as operating manager in a moving company he cofounded in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Diaz’s research focuses on the legitimating effects of labor regulations, such as licensing and, in particular, studies entrepreneurs in competitive environments such as the moving industry. He is also investigating whether compliance with regulations helps or hinder new ventures in stigmatized contexts such as the tattooing industry. His work has been presented at several conferences, and included in the 2020 AOM Best Paper Proceedings.
Adam Frost
Associate Fellow
Adam K. Frost is an associate fellow at IES and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Business Humanities and Law at Copenhagen Business School. Adopting novel mixed-method approaches to examine the history of entrepreneurship and state-business relations in China, Frost has explored the rise and fall of the taxi industry in Republican-era Shanghai, the tactical behavior of begging people in contemporary northwest China, informal entrepreneurship in China’s housing sector and the underground economy of Maoist China. His research has benefitted from the support of the Institution of International Education (Fulbright Scholarship), the Social Science Research Council (Mellon-Mays SSRC Grant), the U.S. Department of Education (FLAS Grant), Harvard Business School (Alfred Chandler Grant), the American Council of Learned Societies (Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship) and Horizon Europe (MSCA Fellowship).
Shuang Li Frost
Associate Fellow
Shuang Li Frost is an associate fellow at IES and an ethnographer of digital technologies and entrepreneurship. She is an assistant professor of digital innovation and business transformation in Aarhus University, Denmark. She received her Ph.D. in social anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary field in science, technology and society. After completing her Ph.D., she worked as a postdoctoral researcher and adjunct professor at Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at USC Marshall Business School. In all her works, Frost engages with the discipline of anthropology and draws inspiration from its core methods and frameworks to study entrepreneurship. From 2014-2019, she conducted a 20-month independent fieldwork in China and completed a monograph-length ethnography about the socioeconomic transformation brought by the ride-hailing platforms. Frost was awarded Harvard Horizons Scholar in 2019 for this work. Currently, she is leading a team of anthropologists and industry experts to study female tech entrepreneurship in the U.S., Denmark and China. Her research was funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark, AUFF and Sino-Danish Center.
Kurian George ’22 Ph.D.
Associate Fellow
Kurian George is an assistant professor in the Department of Management at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in 2022 from the Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises at the Whitman School of Management, where Maria Minniti served as his advisor. Prior to joining IES, George earned an M.S. from the Institute of Rural Management in Gujarat (India), where he also worked for the Ministry of Rural Development.
George’s research focuses on the legitimation strategies entrepreneurs use to attract resources for their ventures, and on how they adjust these strategies to different contexts. Specifically, using both in-depth interviews and regression analyses, he investigates how immigrant entrepreneurs and resettled refugees navigate, often innovatively and with great success, the challenges of establishing legitimacy in a foreign country.
George’s work has been presented at several conferences, including AOM, BCERC and at the Symposium on Market Solutions to Grand Challenges held in 2019 at the Carey Business School of Johns Hopkins University.
John Murphy
Associate Fellow
Jon Murphy is an associate fellow at IES and assistant professor of economics at Nicholls State University, Louisiana. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University. Prior to joining Nicholls State University, he was a visiting professor at Western Carolina University. Murphy has published in information economics, history of thought, and pedagogy research in academic journals such as The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and The Journal of Institutional Economics. He has testified before the North Carolina State Legislature on the issue of insurance reform. Murphy has also worked as a consultant and forecaster for ITR Economics.
Almantas Palubinskas ’20 Ph.D.
Associate Fellow
Almantas Palubinskas is an assistant professor in the Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at EMLyon Business School in France. Palubinskas was a IES Ph.D. student and in December 2020, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises at the Whitman School of Management. Prior to joining IES, Palubinskas earned a B.S. in mathematical economics from Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia.
Framed within the context of the emerging drone industry, Palubinskas research examines how regulations shape the emergence of different types of innovation, and how entrepreneurial firms may influence an emerging industry’s competitive structure using political strategies. His work has been presented at several conferences, including AOM, ISA, BCERC and the Summer Residence for Entrepreneurship Scholars at Oxford University.
He has received the Humane Studies Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies, and a Syracuse University Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship. In 2021, his dissertation was selected as one of the five finalists being considered for the Outstanding Dissertation Research Award in Strategic Management at AOM.
Amrutha Jose Pampackal
Associate Fellow
Amrutha Jose Pampackal is an associate fellow at IES and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University and a research scholar at the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition. She has a master’s degree in public policy from the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Prior to joining Cornell, she was working at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Her current research sits at the intersection of environmental governance and food policy. Her Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the importance of access to forest commons and food markets in shaping the nutrition security of forest-proximate communities. The study is empirically rooted in the data that she collected through one year of fieldwork in Odisha, India. The fieldwork involved three rounds of seasonal surveys and interviews covering 440 households and 12 local food markets. Through her research, Pampackal hopes to advance theory, policy and practices to enhance the food and nutrition security of local people, while also addressing the socioeconomic and ecological pressures on forests.
Zach Rodriguez
Associate Fellow
Zach Rodriguez is an assistant professor of economics at Union College. He was a postdoctoral researcher of the Institute for an Entrepreneurial Society and a member of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises at the Whitman School of Management. He received a Ph.D. in economics from West Virginia University in 2020. Since 2008, Rodriguez is also the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Embrace It Africa (EIA), a nonprofit organization working to encourage sustainable community growth in southern Uganda by providing, among other things, an outpatient healthcare clinic and student sponsorship programs.
Rodriguez research focuses on the intersection between entrepreneurship and economic development, with special emphasis on bottom-up entrepreneurial solutions to public health-care access in both developing and developed countries.
Devin Stein ’23 Ph.D.
Associate Fellow
Devin Stein is an assistant professor of management at the Culverhouse College of Business at the University of Alabama. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises at the Whitman School of Management in 2023. Prior to joining IES, Stein earned a M.S. in economics from Utah State University. He also worked as a policy analyst at Strata Policy, where he focused on bottom-up solutions to energy and environmental issues.
Stein’s research investigates how individuals, communities, and firms can use institutions to create social value and to address complex problems. Focusing on the management of wildfires in Northern California, he uses geospatial and archival satellite analysis to show that communities acting locally while communicating with government agencies are more effective at reducing fire risk than communities acting alone or relying solely on government interventions.