Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference at Technische Universität München

In early June 2024, a total of 360 scholars from 42 countries came to exchange best practices, expertise, and insights on entrepreneurship research at the 2024 Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference, co-hosted by The Technical University of Munich in Germany. Every entrepreneurship scholar knew that when Munich was chosen as the venue for the world’s leading entrepreneurship conference the chances for getting a competitive research paper accepted would be smaller than in other years. Indeed, with 1011 submissions for 229 available slots, the acceptance rate ranked at a competitive 22% and for the full scholarly papers, only 158 slots were allocated (16% acceptance rate).

The conference began with the Babson Doctoral Consortium, a multi-day developmental workshop for junior scholars. After spending a day as one of 31 invited senior scholars mentoring new Ph.D. students, Prof. Dr. Matthias A. Tietz presented his full research paper, developed together with co-author and former Ph.D. student Prof. Dr. Shelby Meek at Kennesaw State University in the United States. The paper proposes that an individual’s outsidership and perspective taking jointly influence the novelty and usefulness (together creativity) of new venture opportunities. Novel data from a series of experiments suggest that insiders’ perspective taking enhances the usefulness of opportunities, whereas outsiders’ perspective taking enhances the novelty of identified opportunities. Further, being an outsider in terms of business knowledge has a U-shaped relationship with opportunity novelty, while being an outsider in terms of social ties has an inverted U-shaped relationship with opportunity novelty. In this way, different aspects of outsidership offer different benefits and when merged may dilute or disguise more complex relationships