This seminar series was launched by the Telfer School of Management Research Office to promote its new professors. It represents an excellent opportunity for professors, students and community members to meet new faculty and to learn more about their research programs.

Please join us for a presentation by Peter Jaskiewicz: When and where do children of entrepreneurial business owners become entrepreneurial?

Entrepreneurial legacies are rhetorical reconstructions of past entrepreneurial achievements or resilience. Research shows that entrepreneurial legacies motivate successors to engage in entrepreneurship, but does not explain their effects on “bypassed siblings”. We develop theory on entrepreneurial exaptation – the extent to which entrepreneurial capabilities developed in one context are applied in others. From qualitative data on 13 German winery-owning families, we theorize that when families are highly cohesive but rigid, entrepreneurial legacies encourage local entrepreneurial exaptation, but when families have moderate cohesion and flexibility, entrepreneurial legacies encourage distant entrepreneurial exaptation. Our findings, however, do not apply to female bypassed siblings due to a historically grounded gender bias. A key implication is that the historical stories business families tell encourages entrepreneurship even among bypassed siblings.

A light lunch will be served.