Off to Boot Camp

9 December 2008 at 3:46 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

I’ll be in Utah this week for the Society for Entrepreneurship Scholars conference, also known as “Manuscript Boot Camp.” It’s a sort of cross between a regular academic conference and a professional development workshop, with an interesting and unusual format. The conference is organized around a set of competitively selected working papers written by PhD students and junior faculty, who will be paired with a rotating series of senior scholars for one-on-one mentoring sessions designed to improve the quality of the papers for publication. These sessions, combined with plenary roundtables and lots of informal interaction, should make for a fun and professionally valuable event, for all concerned. I wish more workshops were organized this way.

The set of senior scholar-mentors includes many of the biggest names in entrepreneurship and strategy research, people like Rajshree Agarwal, David Deeds, Greg Dess, Jeff Dyer, Bill Hesterly, Bob Hoskisson, Jeff Reuer, Harry Sapienza, Bill Schulze, Dave Whetten, and your humble correspondent. More important, the participant list includes several bloggers — me and orgtheory’s Teppo Felin among the mentors, Brian McCann of Management R&D and former O&M guest blogger Chihmao Hsieh among the mentees — so expect good during- and post-conference reporting in the blogosphere.

My only concern, expressed to co-organizer Bill Shulze yesterday, is fitting that many egos into a single room. His solution: “free beer.”