Ted Baker is focused on making do with what is at hand.
He is so focused on this topic, in fact, that he received the 2011 Grief Research Impact Award for his research into bricolage at the August 2011 Academy of Management meeting in San Antonio, Texas.
Baker, an associate professor of management, innovation, and entrepreneurship, defined bricolage as ‘making do by applying combinations of the resources at hand to new problems and opportunities.’
Specifically, his research is focused on entrepreneurs in North Carolina, South Africa and India who do ‘remarkable’ things while having limited resources.
“I try to understand how they do this, what problems and pitfalls they run into and what differentiates their behavior from the patterns of behavior of those entrepreneurs who are less resourceful,” Baker said.
According to a press release from the Poole College of Management, the award is given to “researchers who published the most impactful entrepreneurship article six years ago in the top management and entrepreneurship journals.”
For this award, the magnitude of the impact is measured by the number of times the paper was cited in the five years following publication. Baker’s paper had 347 citations as of mid-August 2011, making it the front-runner.
Roger Debo , director of The Entrepreneurship Collaborative, said that he thinks the strict criteria for this award makes it extra meaningful for Baker.
“This is one of the few awards given that is not in any way political,” Debo said. “They just look at how many citations there are for a journal article. In my mind, that makes it more impressive.”
Debo , who teaches alongside Dr. Baker in the masters in business administration program, went on to say that this award is also special because it measures the impact that Baker’s research has had on fellow researchers.
“It’s about how much the research community has cited your article and included your research in their own,” Debo said. “That’s pretty impressive.”
Ira Weiss, dean of the Poole College of Management, also said that the criteria on which the award was given speaks to the impact of Baker’s work.
“Dr. Baker’s work has been cited more times in the last five years than any other researcher in his field,” Weiss said. “That means more research as to how companies get started are based on his work than any other researcher in the world over the last five years.”
The topic of bricolage is not restricted to entrepreneurial studies, according to Baker.
“The concept of bricolage has been applied across a wide variety of disciplines, from evolutionary biology, to legal studies, to elementary education,” said Baker. “Some of my other work explores bricolage and a related concept – organizational improvisation – among university scientists at and around the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Baker also does research does other entrepreneurial topics, including venture capital and entrepreneurship pedagogy.
Bricolage also has cross-discipline relevance on campus. Erin Powell Smith, graduate research assistant in textiles, has applied and extended the work on bricolage to other forms of resourcefulness to be applicable to textile entrepreneurship, according to Baker.
Baker’s article was co-authored by Reed Nelson of Southern Illinois University.
“I met [Dr. Nelson] when, as editor of a major journal, he rejected one of my papers,” Baker said. “He called me to talk about it, and it turned out we had overlapping interests and started working together immediately.”
Ira Weiss, dean of the Poole College of Management, said that Baker’s research speaks to the significance of research in the field of entrepreneurship.
“Research in entrepreneurship is highly practical and applied,” Weiss said. “It answers the question what makes a business succeed. That should be important for every business student and any other student that will go to work for a profit-making organization.”
Baker said that while entrepreneurial studies may not traditionally come to mind when one thinks of research, it still has vast importance, and students should become involved in it.
“Entrepreneurial research is built on foundations of traditional social and behavioral sciences such as sociology, psychology, and economics,” Baker said. “The best way for student to get involved with research is to talk with faculty members whose work interests them to see whether they would find the actual routine work of doing the research interesting.”
Debo said the impact of Baker’s award will have a positive impact on the college in the future.
“This award is fantastic for our department and college,” Debo said. “It’s been a concerted effort over the past few years to recruit entrepreneurship professors and to build up a strong department, and an award like this helps to put us on the map.”
