The 2024 World Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research Conference brought together participants from Taiwan, Australia, China, the UK, Italy and more to explore the broader impacts of entrepreneurship and innovation.
For the first time in five years, the Global Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research Conference (GEIRC) was held in Boulder on June 13 and 14. In collaboration with the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and the University of Cambridge Judge School of Business, the 2024 GEIRC brought together diverse scholars from around the world to discuss the interdisciplinary impact of entrepreneurship.
Conference co-chair Janet Berkowitz, Director of the Strategy and Entrepreneurship PhD Programme at the University of Leeds, explained that after the conference was suspended, the steering committee, made up of a team from Leeds’ Deming Centre and members from collaborating universities, wanted to “restart the conference in a big way.” The goal was to raise awareness and interest in the GEIRC, as well as make it more global and inclusive.
Bringing the global community together
The conference changes location each year and brings together participants from around the world, providing a unique opportunity for global collaboration. “Broadening the scope of the conference benefits researchers. A lot of research is done in the US, and a lot of the data is US and UK oriented. Getting a broader view from an international perspective provides an opportunity to generate new insights and data,” explained Berkowitz.
Participants came from countries including Taiwan, Australia, China, the UK and Italy to explore the broad impact of entrepreneurship and innovation. “A sub-theme of this year’s conference was using entrepreneurship to solve some of our biggest problems, including income inequality, healthcare and climate change,” said Betsy Klein, associate director of the Deming Entrepreneurship Center.
“By being international and intentional about our call for papers on all types of entrepreneurship research, we have the best opportunity to make the world a better place,” Klein continued.
While Leeds Business School is very much focused on the Boulder and Colorado communities, the conference also supports the school’s goal to make an impact globally. “Bringing scholars from around the world to Boulder to showcase the great things the Leeds School and Boulder have to offer aligns well with that mission,” said conference co-chair Jeff York, Leeds’ associate dean for strategic initiatives and director of research at the Deming Center.
Interdisciplinary perspectives on entrepreneurship
“We have an entrepreneurial mindset. We believe there is an element of entrepreneurial thinking in everything, and that any industry can benefit from an entrepreneurial mindset,” Klein said. This belief has brought together researchers from a variety of fields, including organizational behavior, finance and law.
“The diversity of perspectives presented was impressive,” York added. “Attendees discussed research outside of their own areas of expertise, and it is this interdisciplinary collaboration that really sets this conference apart.”
This provided an opportunity for international participants from various research fields to network and consider future collaborations. [at the conference] “This is unique,” Klein explains, “The papers that are published are not all by faculty from the same school. Scholars make great connections and offer so many different perspectives. For example, we often see doctoral students from the University of Washington, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Oxford, and others collaborating on a paper.”
GEIRC fosters these interdisciplinary connections through careful selection of papers and presentations.
Selecting the right study
One of the conference’s main goals was to receive high-quality paper submissions and curate a coherent set of presentation sessions. After receiving over 100 submissions, the judging committee selected approximately 40 to highlight during the event. The two-day conference featured 12 unique sessions covering corporate innovation, governance, stakeholder engagement, and entrepreneurship for the public good.
“We ended up splitting into two tracks because we had so many high-quality papers,” Berkowitz says, “and each session was unified by a central theme. For example, we had a session that looked at economic agglomerations.” The papers in that session focused on different elements of how economies come together, but a central theme emerged: how place matters.
The conference also offered a new opportunity for doctoral students to share their research in three-minute presentations called “flash talks.” By paring down the students’ research to the most important parts, they were able to expose themselves to a wider network and get feedback from more experienced researchers during breaks. “Typically, you only have around 15 minutes, so three minutes is a very short amount of time,” York explains. “But it was one of the most popular parts of the conference because it’s interesting to share your research in rapid succession. It really gets you on the right track and gets people talking.”
The future of GEIRC
Next year the conference will be held in Taiwan, where members of the Leeds community will have the opportunity to serve on the paper examination committee and help plan the conference. “It’s a great opportunity to continue to engage with partners around the world,” York said.
As the conference continues to expand, co-chairs Berkowitz and York hope that interdisciplinary perspectives will continue to be a priority, paving the way for special issues of the research journal and future panel sessions outside the conference. Adding more partners to the conference is also a priority.
“We’re definitely looking to add partners in Asia, and we’d love to see partners from the Southern Hemisphere as well,” York said. “Adding South America, for example, really makes this conference reach every corner of the globe.”
Locally, the team at the Deming Center is also excited to launch new episodes of their podcast, “Creative Distillation,” this fall. Each episode will highlight a recent study and discuss how that research is valuable to business school students and the startup community at large. During the conference, York, who is also a co-host of the podcast, had the opportunity to speak with dozens of researchers from around the world.
The conference is scheduled to continue to travel, coming to the UK in 2026 before returning to the US in 2027. “We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Darden and Judge. It’s a fantastic opportunity to bring faculty from around the world closer together and build great relationships,” York said.
