All University faculty members are being invited to submit proposals for academic research projects addressing aspects of entrepreneurship in their discipline area or cutting across disciplines.
More than $600,000 will be available over three years for single or multiyear projects through a grant program to be administered and coordinated by the newly established Center for Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CRIE).
Each research project may receive up to $40,000 for each year of work for up to three years. The funding is provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Robert and Julie Skandalaris.
The new center will serve all areas of the University but will be physically located in the School of Law, which is also providing funding.
“We are extremely excited about the role CRIE can take in advancing the understanding of entrepreneurship,” said Ken Harrington, managing director of The Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. “The field of entrepreneurship needs quality research, and we are fortunate to have the opportunity to support work by Washington University’s faculty.
“We hope to engage faculty and students across the campus.”
The mission of the center is to generate top quality research on targeted topics in the area of entrepreneurship, said Charles R. McManis, J.D., director of the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Program at the law school and founder of CRIE.
“The desire is to have this research published in leading academic journals in the faculty member’s discipline area,” McManis said.
Faculty or interdisciplinary teams representing diverse disciplines such as art, economics, political science, engineering, social work, law, business and the sciences may submit proposals. CRIE is particularly interested in research relating to the following areas:
• Innovation and/or productivity in organizations, including for-profit, not-for-profit, government and education types;
• Technology transfer, including all the relationships between scientific discovery, law and business;
• How entrepreneurs learn;
• Women and minorities as entrepreneurs; and
• Economic development policy and how entrepreneurial activity affects growth, wealth and mankind.
“Our definition of entrepreneurship is broad and meant to invite research concepts from academic disciplines that might not typically consider this topic,” said Robert E. Thach, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and chair of the Entrepreneurial Research Sub-Committee of the University’s Entrepreneurship Steering Committee.
“Our definition is meant to be more encompassing than only considering ‘the activities of starting a new business.’ Rather, the committee views entrepreneurship as a process that has an impact on others and causes change.”
The Entrepreneurial Research Sub-Committee, which will approve the awards, defines entrepreneurship as the process of seeing opportunities, acting energetically and using limited resources to create new value for others. The process results in innovative discoveries, products, services and sustainable activities that satisfy individuals while benefiting mankind.
Application details
Applications must be submitted by Sept. 30 with awards expected in late October. Interested faculty, including new assistant professors, should prepare a submission following the Faculty Research Funding Application Outline and related Research Funding Supplemental Worksheet, which can be obtained from Josephine Hobbs (jdhobbs@wulaw.wustl.edu; Campus Box 1120; 935-6474). These forms must be e-mailed to Hobbs by Sept. 30.
Proposal requests may be made for up to three years with the understanding that funding is approved only for the first year. Funding for subsequent years will be contingent upon research results in previous years.
Funding will be made on a calendar-year basis, with the first award covering researchers’ needs for January-December 2005.
The strength of the proposals will be evaluated on these criteria:
• Synergy with faculty-member interests and relationship to previous work;
• Significance of research and expected value of findings, including journals targeted for publication;
• Overall research project plan, including references to methodology and approach; and
• Relationship to the stated topics of interest.
Other factors to be considered include engaging graduate students in the research, degree of collaboration with scholars in other disciplines, previous scholarly record and interest in the broad topic of entrepreneurship.
Washington University is one of eight U.S. universities recently selected by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to share $25 million in grants through the Kauffman Campuses initiative, which is designed to make entrepreneurship education available across campus and transform the way entrepreneurship is viewed, taught and experienced. Schools must match the Kauffman Campuses grant at least 2-to-1.