McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership
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| Photo by Steffen Jugl |
The Center sponsors academic and practitioner-oriented conferences, it provides financial support to faculty and students, and its Faculty Fellows teach the core entrepreneurship courses in the College of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources.
Our objectives are to understand better the nature and significance of creative, innovative, and judgmental decision-making within organizations and economies. We are particularly interested in the commercialization of new ideas, especially as they relate to the establishment of new forms of organization. We are focused on innovations and creative activities that foster new enterprises that contribute to rural economic growth. We strive to provide a bridge between entrepreneurs and academia to increase the knowledge flow in both directions. We set an example for colleagues at the University of Missouri by incorporating entrepreneurship into all aspects of the educational enterprise with which we are associated.
Our approach to entrepreneurship is influenced by the ideas of theorists such as Frank H. Knight and Ted Schultz. We adopt the Knightian emphasis on entrepreneurship decision-making under uncertainty, in which entrepreneurial action is linked closely to investment, not merely the identification of opportunities, and Schultz’s idea that entrepreneurship is manifested not only in the creation of new enterprises, products, and markets, but also in the responses of market participants to exogenous changes in technology, regulation, and market conditions.
The Division of Applied Social Sciences within the College of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources, in which our Faculty Fellows are housed, has particular research strengths in organization, management, and strategy. Consequently, the McQuinn Center faculty take a strong interest in the organizational and managerial aspects of entrepreneurship, viewing designing contracts and organizational structures, renegotiating agreements, adapting business models, etc. as entrepreneurial actions. We also try to move beyond the individual entrepreneur to study the entrepreneurial team (e.g., developing a notion of “collective entrepreneurship“). We also emphasize, in our research, teaching, and outreach, the applications of entrepreneurship to key issues in food, agriculture, biotechnology, natural resources, and rural development, such as the organizational and strategic responses to biotechnology innovation, the effects of entrepreneurial action on local and regional development, and the analysis of new-generation cooperatives as collective entrepreneurial enterprises.