The Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC), founded by Babson College in 1981, is considered the world’s leading entrepreneurship research conference. BCERC 2016 was held at Nord University Business School in Bodø (Norway). ACE’s Per Davidsson, Annelore Huyghe, Jaehu Shim, Paul Steffens and Kunlin Xu traveled to the land of the midnight sun to present their work and to receive valuable feedback from peers.
Popular themes in the conference program – a total of 222 papers – were: crowdfunding [17], new venture team dynamics [11], family businesses [10], gender influences [9], entrepreneurial exit [7], effectuation/bricolage [7], (fear of) failure [6], passion [5], business angels [5], and entrepreneurial identity [5].
Congratulations to Paul Steffens, Annelore Huyghe, Leo Paas and Per Davidsson whose paper “Resource-Based Capability Trajectories of Early-Stage Ventures” was chosen to appear in the best paper proceedings, Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research. This is quite an honor, with only 40 of over 220 papers presented at the conference selected for the BCERC proceedings, and the acceptance rate for the conference in the first place being less than 35%.
In addition to fruitful paper discussions, the conference offered plenty of networking opportunities. Social events included an opening reception at the Stormen Library – an architectural must-see, a traditional Nordic dinner in tipi tents, and the award’s dinner.
The 37th edition of the conference will take place June 7-10, 2017, in Oklahoma (USA). The call for papers can be found here; submission deadline is 19 October 2016. A doctoral consortium is held in conjunction with BCERC, which allows future entrepreneurship scholars to interact with and learn from thought leaders in the field.
