What I love about research is its ability to uncover previously unknown or undocumented novel insights and stories. Entrepreneurship, where I am a full entrepreneurship professor is one among many areas where there is an abundance of such hidden research treasure waiting to be uncovered. Getting to discover those research stories first are a driving motivation.
Areas in which I have dug my spade include family business, and in particular extreme family business behaviour; how valuable network ties are formed by new entrepreneurs with little or no resources, and the salience of temporality in project business development. What I find intriguing, and this underpins much of the work I do, is constraint and how this influences the behavioural responses, practices, and approaches adopted by entrepreneurs and decision makers. My tool of choice is qualitative methods because these permit the deep exploration that is typically needed when seeking to unearth buried research treasure. Incidentally, I started my research journey as a PhD graduate of Imperial College Business School, and am now a holder of the French HDR degree.