BCFE host workshop - Learning to fly: Entrepreneurship Research as a Living Process of Inquiry
On Thursday, 22nd February 2024, the workshop 'Learning to fly: Entrepreneurship Research as a Living Process of Inquiry' took place, organised and led by Dr David Higgins from the University of Liverpool Management School and hosted by the The University of Liverpool Management School’s Brett Centre for Entrepreneurship. This innovative event was supported by the European Council of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ECSB) event fund, and the British Academy of Management (BAM) Research Methods and Entrepreneurship Special Interest Groups.
The workshop was attended by PhD candidates, early, mid, and late career researchers who heard from scholars from education, sociology, organisational behaviour, and anthropology disciplines sharing insights to the question of 'how can we make inquiry into entrepreneurship more interesting and purposeful?'.
Structured through a series of 'Creative Acts', this interactive workshop allowed participants to re-discover, re-explore, and re-engage with what inquiry means to researchers, as well as uncovering practices on what it means to be curious, and whether and how researchers view entrepreneurship as a field of inquiry.As well as challenging conventional canons of entrepreneurship scholarship, an opportunity was provided to develop a more contextual and processual account of different methods of inquiry in social sciences.
The day was captured via a series of ‘bricolage’ sessions, that was modelled on a pilot at the University of Strathclyde, as part of the Erasmus+ TrEE (Transforming Enterprise Education) project. These sessions were facilitated by Professor Mark Saunders from the University of Birmingham, Dr Fariba Darabi from Bangor Business School and Trudie Murray from Munster Technological University.
Professor Pamela Burnard from University of Cambridge delivered an interactive session on voicing a plurality of creativities and dancing between entrepreneurship and studious play. Professor David Coghlan from Trinity College Dubin, delivered a session entitled ‘Putting the knower back into knowing, the practitioner back into practice, the researcher back into research and the entrepreneur back into entrepreneurship’.
Professor Andrew Irvine from University of Manchester took participants to the outdoors where they engaged in a walking ethnographic experience. Professor Sophie Woodward from University of Manchester presented on object-based methods and using material methods and approaches as a form of creative methodology, drawing from art, and design-based disciplines to research with things. The day ended with Dr Alexandra Bristow from The Open University, who presented on ‘doing’ our academic careers differently, taking us through visual portraits of academic life.
About the Brett Centre for Entrepreneurship
The Brett Centre for Entrepreneurship is a connected hub of excellence for people and organisations interested in entrepreneurship research, theory, policy and practice.
The Centre, led by Professor Robert Blackburn, is one of six Research Centres based at the University of Liverpool Management School, with a mission to develop and harness the power of entrepreneurship.
We engage with academics, policymakers, and practitioners both locally and worldwide to ensure that our agendas are compelling, relevant and that the methods we use are cutting-edge and robust. This reflects our passion to understand and foster entrepreneurship and to help develop an entrepreneurial culture across the Liverpool City Region and beyond.
Whilst there is an emphasis on entrepreneurship research, the Centre also focuses on two other areas of activities - education and impact. Collectively these three pillars are mutually supporting to provide a solid foundation to help achieve our mission.