McQuinn Research
The McQuinn Center is deeply committed to top-tier academic research, and McQuinn Center faculty and students are involved in a number of important projects. Some of our current research streams are described below.
Entrepreneurship and the Economic Theory of the Firm
In a series of papers and a book under preparation for Cambridge University Press, McQuinn Center Director Peter Klein and Nicolai Foss of the Copenhagen Business School are developing an entrepreneurial theory of the business firm that combines the insights of Frank Knight, Ludwig von Mises, and other scholars on entrepreneurship with the modern economic theory of the firm. Several of the papers are alwo reproduced in Klein's 2010 book The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur. While the economic theories of the entrepreneur and the firm emerged largely in isolation, Klein and Foss argue that they can be usefully brought together by focusing on the concept of entrepreneurship as judgment about resource use under conditions of uncertainty. This framework has important implications for organizational design, firm boundaries, public policy toward business, and other areas. Graduate Research Fellows Per Bylund and Mario Mondelli are also involved in this project.
Collective Entrepreneurship
McQuinn Research Fellows Michael Cook and David O'Brien, along with several colleagues at the University of Missouri and elsewhere, are extending insights from the entrepreneurship literature to the organization and governance of patron-owned firms such as cooperatives and mutuals. Much of this work involves detailed, inductive case studies of patron-owned firms around the world, and is leading to a concept of "collective entrepreneurship" that both challenges and complements existing theories of cooperatives and mutuals. Cook also directs the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership which brings together top executives from the world's largest cooperatives to discuss innovation, organizational renewal, restructuring, and similar issues.
Rural Household Entrepreneurship in the US and Russia
McQuinn Fellow David O'Brien has been working for the past two decades with Russian and American collaborators on rural household entrepreneurship in post-Soviet Russia (see, for example, O'Brien and Patsiorkovsky, Measuring Social and Economic Change in Rural Russia: Surveys from 1991 to 2003). O'Brien and Michael Cook are currently research consultants on a USAID/Land O'Lakes Foundation team working on the development of horizontal and vertically integrated dairy cooperatives in Kenya and Uganda.