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IU’s Kelley School of Business earns global No. 1 ranking in entrepreneurship research

For Immediate Release Oct 5, 2017

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – A comprehensive, 12-year review of academic entrepreneurship research designed to identify leading scholars and universities ranked Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business as having the greatest impact on the field.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Small Business Management, also cited three current Kelley faculty members as being among the top 25 leading entrepreneurship scholars worldwide.

These findings follow new rankings in U.S. News and World Report, which ranked Kelley’s entrepreneurship program No. 3 overall and first among public universities.

The paper, “Contributing Forces in Entrepreneurship Research: A Global Citation Analysis,” is a qualitative study, based on a review of 191,695 citations on 2,154 articles published in leading journals from 2002 to 2013. Authors highlighted the top 100 institutions worldwide and found Kelley to “be the most productive.”

“Indiana University, the leading entrepreneurship program in North America, over the years built its program as the leader of entrepreneurship education and research,” the authors wrote. “Its continuous support in the development of research in entrepreneurship management and corporate innovation has attracted a community of excellent faculty.

“Leading scholars, with little doubt, are the driving force for their institutions to be ranked highly,” they added.

The paper’s authors are Nianhang Xu, professor of finance at Renmin University in China, Yining Chen and Kam C. Chan, professors of accounting and finance at Western Kentucky University, and Anna Fung, a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington.

“Research is the core of any discipline, and research productivity is a key testament of a program’s faculty,” said Idalene “Idie” Kesner, dean of the Kelley School and the Frank P. Popoff Chair of Strategic Management. “This ranking is another validation of the quality of entrepreneurship faculty we have at Kelley.”

Kelley faculty among the paper’s top 25 entrepreneurship scholars were Donald F. Kuratko, the Jack M. Gill Distinguished Chair of Entrepreneurship, professor of entrepreneurship, and executive and academic director of the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation; Jeffery S. McMullen, the Dale Coleman Chair of Management and professor of entrepreneurship; and Tricia P. McDougall-Covin, the William L. Haeberle Professor of Entrepreneurship and professor of strategic management. A former Kelley faculty member, Dean Shepherd, also was cited for his contributions to the field.

Kelley had the most faculty among the paper’s list of top 25 entrepreneurship scholars. Only two other schools – Syracuse University and Texas A&M – had more than one person on the list.

“This achievement is a reflection of the quality research team we have in entrepreneurship at Indiana University,” Kuratko said. “I remain proud of our incredible entrepreneurship team as we continue to add the next generation of great entrepreneurship scholars.”

Previous research studies have assessed programs based on the quantity of research but seldom have examined the contributing factors for entrepreneurship research quality. The authors focused on publications in 14 top-tier entrepreneurship and management journals and used Google Scholar to measure citations. To assess articles with multiple authors, they credited each author proportionally to the number of co-authors.

Among the top 100 entrepreneurship institutions, 67 are based in North America – including 55 in the United States. Another 28 are based in Europe and four others are in Australia and China. After Kelley, the next four top entrepreneurship programs were Jönköping University in Sweden, Rensselaer Poly Institute, the University of Alberta in Canada and the University of Minnesota.

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Kelley School of Business

George Vlahakis

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