Many of the most pressing social, economic and environmental challenges take place amongst the world’s poor and in countries that have experienced natural disasters. Our published and on-going work explores entrepreneurship in Haiti, Chile, North Korea, Africa and in countries constituting the ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ with an aim to contribute to the improvement of the circumstances faced by these people as well as to advance the entrepreneurship scholarship to include the multitude of entrepreneurial phenomena.
For our recent work, we conducted an ethnography in Limonade, a Haitian community affected by the 2010 earthquake, to gain an understanding of the creation of new institutions across the three disaster recovery phases, and how collective emotions motivate engagement in this work.
- Farny, S., Kibler, E. & Down, S. 2018. Collective Emotions in Institutional Creation Work, Academy of Management Journal.
Based on a two-stage exploratory study pre and post the Calbuco Volcano eruptions in 2015 and 2016 in Chile, our work develops a refined understanding of the antecedents and aftermath of entrepreneurial behavior in communities living under continuous threat.
- Muñoz, P., Kimmitt, J., Kibler, E. & Farny, S. 2018. Living on the Slopes: Entrepreneurial Preparedness in a Context Under Continuous Threat. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.
Focusing on the impact of entrepreneurship, we have in particular looked at the potential entrepreneurship offers at the ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’, where more than 1 billion people subsist on less than $2 a day. Our work has brought together evidence on the extent to which microcredit-enabled entrepreneurship can reduce poverty in developing countries and examined how the distinctive conditions of the BoP affect the development and replication of scalable business solutions for the world’s poor.
- Chliova, M., & Ringov, D. 2017. Scaling impact: Template development and replication at the base of the pyramid.Academy of Management Perspectives, 31(1), 44-62.
- Chliova, M., Brinckmann, J., & Rosenbusch, N. 2015. Is microcredit a blessing for the poor? A meta-analysis examining development outcomes and contextual considerations.Journal of Business Venturing, 30(3), 467-487.
Building on on-the-ground experiences in North Korea, we have assessed the legitimacy tensions that arise within teaching space as entrepreneurial ideas are translated between market-orientated economies and North Korea’s political economy.