All University faculty members are invited to submit proposals for academic research projects addressing aspects of entrepreneurship in their areas of discipline or cutting across disciplines.
Funding will be made available over two years for single or multiyear projects through a grant program to be administered and coordinated by the Center for Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CRIE), which is located in the School of Law but serves all areas of the University.
Each research project may receive up to $40,000 for each year of work for up to two years.
The funding is provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Robert and Julie Skandalaris.
Faculty or interdisciplinary teams representing diverse disciplines such as art, economics, political science, engineering, social work, law, business and the sciences may submit proposals. The CRIE is particularly interested in research relating to the following areas:
• Innovation and/or productivity in organizations, including for-profit, not-for-profit, government and education types;
• Technology transfer, including all the relationships between scientific discovery, law and business;
• How entrepreneurs learn;
• Women and minorities as entrepreneurs; and
• Economic development policy and how entrepreneurial activity affects growth, wealth and mankind.
The Entrepreneurial Research Sub-Committee, which will approve the awards, defines entrepreneurship as the process of seeing opportunities, acting energetically and using limited resources to create new value for others. The process results in innovative discoveries, products, services and sustainable activities that satisfy individuals while benefiting mankind.
Applications must be submitted by Nov. 5 to Karma Q. Jenkins at kqjenkins@wulaw.wustl.edu or Campus Box 1120. Awards are expected to be announced by early December. Interested faculty should prepare a submission following the Faculty Research Funding Application Outline and the related Research Funding Supplemental Worksheet available at www.law.wustl.edu/crie.
Proposal requests may be made for up to two years with the understanding that funding is approved only for the first year. Funding for the second year will be contingent upon research results in the first. Funding will be granted on a fiscal-year basis.
The strength of the proposals will be evaluated on these criteria:
• Synergy with faculty member interests and relationship to previous work;
• Significance of research and expected value of findings, including journals targeted for publication;
• Overall research project plan, including references to methodology and approach; and
• Relationship to the stated topics of interest.
Other factors to be considered include engaging graduate students in the research, degree of collaboration with scholars in other disciplines, previous scholarly record, interest in the topic of entrepreneurship and availability of funding.
WUSTL was one of eight U.S. universities selected by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to share $25 million in grants through the Kauffman Campuses initiative, which is designed to make entrepreneurship education available across campuses and transform the way entrepreneurship is viewed, taught and experienced. Schools must match the Kauffman Campuses’ grant at least 2-to-1.
For a list of previous competitive faculty grant recipients, go online to law.wustl.edu/CRIE/grants.