If you want to meet great minds in entrepreneurial thinking, then the ACERE conference is definitely the place to be. For me, the conference was a real shot in the arm. It got me out of my workplace and engaged with people from around the world doing really interesting research and bringing challenging and thought-provoking ideas. The range of papers gave me the chance to get a bit better acquainted with aspects of entrepreneurship and innovation that lie outside my field, and gave me a couple of research ideas to develop over the coming year.
I enjoyed the social program and the chance to talk to very experienced, as well as very new researchers. It was instructive to learn how life is for other entrepreneurship academics, and good to get some more ideas about research approaches and methods, as well as a couple of contacts for future collaborative research. The plenary sessions were a real bonus; the keynote speaker, Saras Sarasvathy, helped me to learn something about the intersubjective and interpersonal in entrepreneurship and certainly gave me something to think about; especially as the question of how entrepreneurs arrive at financing arrangements is an area I hadn’t thought much about.
In addition, the session with Journal editors, Dean Shepherd and Per Davidsson, was really practical and motivating, and I came away with a list of categories of papers and exemplar papers which is helping me to think more clearly about research and publication planning.
The real bonus for me was the paper development session. I’m very grateful that I had the chance to take part in this. The insightful and incisive critiques helped me to work out how to properly frame my paper in relation to the theory, and also gave me the idea of a “template” that I’m applying to a couple of research ideas that I was having difficulty in nailing down. That was a really valuable session that finished the conference on a very high note and sent me home re-motivated and re-energised!
Many thanks to Peter Balan from the University of South Australia for contributing this story.
The next ACERE conference is to be held in Sydney, Australia. 4 to 7 February 2014. For more information look out for posts on the ACERE website www.acereconference.com