Chris Rider is the Thomas C. Kinnear Professor and Associate Professor of Strategy, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

Chris’s research draws on organization theory to study individual outcomes like entrepreneurship and mobility; organizational behaviors like hiring, staffing, and retention; and organizational outcomes like founding, change, and survival. He is particularly interested in new organizations, labor markets, and social networks. His work has been published in leading Journals, such as ASQ, Org. Science, SMJ, and American Economic Review.

Title: “From laborer to founder: A mechanism-based framework for examining how individuals and opportunities shape an entrepreneur’s fundamental transition”
Date: Wednesday, 6 November, 2019.
Time: 12:00 to 14:00 pm.
Room: 1112, Building A.

Abstract:
“We present a general framework for studying how individuals and opportunities shape entrepreneurship. We propose standard measures of opportunity potential (i.e., profitability implied by market activity) and of individual access to market information (i.e., buyer-supplier relationships). We then motivate signature predictions for three distinct mechanisms — discovery, discernment, and exploitation — through which individuals and opportunities intersect to shape one’s fundamental transition from laborer to organizational founder. Empirical analyses of a large online platform for freelance labor demonstrate how our theoretical framework can be systematically applied to study entrepreneurial activity. We find that, in this context, the fundamental transition is shaped by both individual and opportunity effects through discovery and exploitation mechanisms. We discuss theoretical implications for entrepreneurship and strategy research on the opportunity construct as well as applications of our framework in other settings.”