In a just accepted paper on entrepreneurship during the COVID crisis and the intriguing concept of arbitrage or temporary opportunities, Associate Professor Dev Dutta and co-authors Dr. Indu Khurana (Hampden-Sydney College, VA) and Dr. Mark Schenkel (Belmont University, TN) investigated whether and how entrepreneurs notice any silver lining during a crisis in terms of emerging opportunities, and if so, how do they go about realizing them.
The study, based on the US distillery industry during 2020-21, reveals that entrepreneurs seized a latent, lurking opportunity to make sanitizers and went through an opportunity realization process highly compressed in time, requiring them to fundamentally change their decision logics as well as learning efforts. The study findings, soon to be published in a forthcoming issue of the International Small Business Journal (ABDC A, Impact Factor 5.47), open up prospects of future follow-up studies on the currently under-researched fields of arbitrage opportunities in entrepreneurship as well as opportunity development under adversity and crisis.
Dutta was also recently inducted as a 2021 Babson Fellow for Entrepreneurship Research. As part of this, he worked closely with Babson professors and senior entrepreneurship and innovation scholars Dr. Candida Brush, Dr. William Gartner, and Dr. Gina O’Connor.
The Babson Fellows Program for Entrepreneurship Researchers is an immersive online academic writing workshop for entrepreneurship scholars to gain a profound understanding of entrepreneurship research.
