Symposium: Entrepreneurship in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12776
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

474 Public Administration Review • May | June 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 3, pp. 474–475. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12776.

Call for Papers Guest Editors

• David B. Audretsch , Indiana University,

Bloomington, United States

• Donald S. Siegel , Arizona State University,

United States

• Siri Terjesen , American University, United States,

and Norwegian School of Economics, Norway

E ntrepreneurship is a topic of growing interest

to academics and policy makers. Scholars in

the field of public administration have been

slower than academics in other fields (e.g., business

administration and economics) to embrace the study

of entrepreneurship. That is not surprising since

entrepreneurial activity has traditionally focused on

the private sector and the pursuit of profit.

However, in recent years, we have witnessed a

substantial rise in entrepreneurial initiatives in

the public and nonprofit sectors. These initiatives

involve numerous government and nonprofit entities,

including federal agencies, universities, foundations,

and state and local governments. Entrepreneurship

in the public and nonprofit sectors has broader social

goals than conventional forms of entrepreneurship,

such as the more rapid commercialization and use of

inventions and new technologies arising from federally

funded research, enhancement of regional economic

development, sustainability and other environmental

objectives, and remedying other market failures with

innovative solutions. These new initiatives also have

important implications for the “entrepreneurial”

behavior of public sector managers (e.g., Lewis

1980 ; Schneider and Teske 1992 ) and thus, the

vast literature in public administration and political

science on public entrepreneurship (e.g., McGinnis

and Ostrom 2012 ; Osborne and Gaebler 1993 ;

Ostrom 1964 , 2005 ; Wagner 1966 ).

The proposed symposium seeks to bring together

papers that address these issues. Another key

goal of the symposium is to foster stronger links

among entrepreneurship researchers in a variety

of social science disciplines (including the field of

management) and public administration scholars.

Some themes that papers in the proposed symposium

might address are:

• Public entrepreneurship and public sector

entrepreneurship (Bellone and Goerl 1992 ;

Bernier and Hafsi 2007 ; Leyden and Link 2015 ;

Moon 1999 ).

• Public policies and programs to promote

entrepreneurship, e.g., the Bayh-Dole Act

(Aldridge and Audretsch 2011 ; Berman 2012 ),

the Small Business Innovation Research Program

(Audretsch, Link, and Scott 2002 ), and the NSF

I-Corps Program (Pellicane and Blaho 2015 ).

• Social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in

the nonprofit sector (Frumkin and Kim 2001 ;

Korosec and Berman 2006 ; Schneider 2017 ;

Terjesen 2017 ; Terjesen, Bosma, and Stam 2016 ;

Waddock and Post 1991 ).

• Academic/university entrepreneurship, including

technology transfer offices and property-based

institutions, such as incubators/accelerators

and science/technology parks (Link, Siegel, and

Wright 2015 ; Siegel, Waldman, and Link 2003 ;

Yu, Stough, and Nijkamp 2009 ).

• The contribution of entrepreneurship to regional

economic development (e.g., Decker et al.

2014 ).

The symposium will incorporate regular Public

Administration Review ( PAR ) features, including

Theory to Practice, Research Synthesis, Public

Administration and the Disciplines, Book Reviews,

Perspectives, and Commentary.

The Review Process and Tentative Timetable

The following is a tentative schedule for the proposed

symposium:

• Submission of papers: May 2018

• First round completed reviews of submitted

papers: August 2018

• Developmental workshop at the National

Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC:

September 2018

• Submission of final papers: January–March 2019

Note that there will be a special developmental

workshop for highly promising papers under review,

which will be held at the National Academy of

Sciences in Washington, DC.

References

Aldridge , Taylor , and David B. Audretsch . 2011 . The Bayh-

Dole Act and Scientist Entrepreneurship . Research Policy 40 :

1058 – 1067 .

Symposium: Entrepreneurship in the

Public and Nonprofit Sectors