The Academic Entrepreneur: A Biographical Sketch of Ian C. MacMillan's Contributions to Establishing the Field of Entrepreneurship
Ian C. MacMillan, originally from Africa, is a seminal figure in forging the contours of the present-day field of entrepreneurship. He was the first to empirically explore topics such as venture capital decision making; entrepreneurial networks; cultural influences on entrepreneurial behavior; and many issues in corporate venturing. Through the creation of vibrant, global, scholarly networks, the founding of the Journal of Business Venturing, his dedication to training and mentoring the next generation of scholars, and establishing the first large-scale systematic global data collection in the field, Mac has made an irreplaceable contribution to the well-established field that entrepreneurship has become. He and his students have been acknowledged as having made significant breakthroughs in our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena, recognized by a burgeoning number of awards and testaments to scholarly recognition. He argues that the challenge for future researchers will be to tackle big, messy problems that do not lend themselves to the popular methodologies employed by academia today.
