In This Issue:
Faculty News
Funds Available
Upcoming Research Chats
Grant Writing Tips
BFRF Spring Course Releases
Corporate, Foundations and Government Relations Office (CFGR)
Final Products Accepted
Community of Science (COS)
Faculty News
"Pioneering strategies for entrepreneurial success" by Candida G. Brush, Entrepreneurship, was published by Business Horizons. This article discusses pioneering strategies and offers guidance on how to implement these.
Dennis Mathaisel, Mathematics and Science, has won a Best Paper Award for his paper entitled "Exceeding the Competition by Implementing a Lean Enterprise Approach for Change." Mathaisel presented the paper at the 2008 Applied Business and Research and College Teaching and Learning Conference in Orlando that was held January 2-5, 2008. Another paper, "Transforming Urban Public Transportation: A Lean Enterprise Approach," has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Business & Economics Research.
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BFRF Funds Available
The BFRF has funds available for research-related expenses such as research assistants, editing, transcribing, data collection, statistical consulting, and other necessary expenses.
Requests ($2500 max) require a one-page Mini-Grant application.
Contact Susan Chern, x5339 for more information.
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Upcoming Research Programs
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 (More Info)
Craig Ehrlich, Accounting and Law
"May CPAs Use Exculpatory Clauses in Their Letters of Engagement?"
Marjorie Feld, History and Society
Lillian Wald: Ethnic Progressive
Save the Dates for Chats on
Wednesday, March 5
Wednesday, March 26
Thursday, April 24
and an External Funding Panel on
Thursday, April 3
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Grant Writing Tips
(From the fall grant proposal writing workshop)
Inspire Confidence!
- Write a cover letter that establishes this proposal as an addition to a body of research
- Allude to specific, past projects or successes
- Include detailed financial projections, if applicable
- Establish clear, measurable, time-bound outcomes
- Use the first person: “I will…”
Know your Audience - Imagine them—draw a mental picture
- What adjectives would you use to describe them?
What motivates them?
What attitudes might they have?
What are their possible emotional states when they are reading your proposal?
What preconceived notions might they have of you?
Are they bored, tired and/or cynical - Know whether or not your audience will be comprised of those in your discipline only
- In general, it’s best to write for a generally educated audience—assume your proposal will be forwarded
How does your grant proposal stack up?
If you would like some individual help with a proposal, contact Kerry Rourke, Director of the Writing Center to schedule an appointment.
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Spring Course Releases
The following faculty members will be using BFRF spring 2008 Course Releases to advance their research agendas.
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities
"Living in the Awakened Dark: Race, Poverty, and Genocide in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones"
Goldberg uses the novel as a site of exploration of converging strains of intellectual and political work in literary studies, human rights, and critical race theory.
Michael Goldstein, Finance
"Purchasing IPOs with Commissions: Theoretical Predictions and Empirical Results"
This research studies how lead underwriters allocate IPOs to the underwriter's best clients and to short-term traders who increase the commissions they pay around the IPO issue date.
Dana Greenberg, Management
"Negotiating after the Negotiation: The Challenge of Implementing Flexible Work Arrangements"
This research uses in-depth qualitative interviews to investigate the actual outcomes of negotiated agreements and, specifically, the implementation issues and experiences women face as they navigate the ongoing conflict situations inherent in working a flexible schedule.
Gang Hu, Finance
"Voting and Trading in Acquisitions by Institutional Investors"
This study explores the institutional investors’ role in corporate governance by analyzing their voting and daily trading behavior around mergers and acquisitions between 1999 and 2005.
Donna Kelley, Entrepreneurship
"Organizational Characteristics of Breakthrough Technologies"
This research has two objectives: to understand (1) the regional and organizational type differences of breakthrough technologies versus nonbreakthroughs and (2) the organizational origins of the prior art they build on.
Yoo-Taek Lee (joint with Kathleen Sweet-McKone), TOIM
"The Role of Complementary Resources in Developing Competitive Supply Chain by Implementing Web-Based Applications"
This paper investigates the role of complementary resources in developing competitive supply chains by implementing web-based applications based on survey data collected from more than 500 firms from 11 industries in Korea.
Mark Potter, Finance
"Jekyl or Hide: Behavior of Managers Who Run Multiple Funds"
This study provides empirical evidence on the performance, risk-taking activity, and tournament behavior of multiple-fund managers relative to their industry counterparts who focus on managing a single fund.
Anne Roggeveen, Marketing
"How Cue Congruity Affects Consumer Perceptions"
Drawing from the cue diagnosticity and level of congruence paradigms, this research examines how a low-scope cue such as a price-matching guarantee or an in-stock guarantee differentially impacts perceptions and intentions as a function of the level of congruence with and valence of the high-scope cue such as the retailer’s reputation.
Denise Troxell, Mathematics and Science
"On the Efficiency of l(2,1)-Labelings: Minimizing the Range and Number of Holes"
There is a need for efficient L(2,1)-labelings that not only minimize the range of frequencies used but also minimize the number of unused frequencies (holes) within this minimum range. These efficient L(2,1)-labelings are the focus of this work.
These faculty members also have spring 2008 release time as part of major BFRF awards (more than a single course release or stipend).
Lydia Moland, Arts and Humanities
"Aesthetic Reflection: Hegel, Art and the Citizen’s Disposition"
This essay will connect Hegel’s aesthetic and political theory through analyzing Hegel’s Aesthetics and the literature he discusses.
Ivor Morgan and Jay Rao, TOIM
Experience Innovators
Morgan and Rao have created a new typology for classifying service industries – Positive, Routine and Negative services. Having completed the work on negative and routine service industries, they now focus on 10-12 positive service companies to complete their book manuscript.
Srinivasa Ranga, Management
Globalization of Entrepreneurial Capitalism
Global capital flows are dramatically changing the global business ecosystem by promoting new companies, new industries, new division of labor, and even new regulatory mechanisms; and these flows are changing the nature of entrepreneurship all over the world in fundamental ways.
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Corporate, Foundations and Government Relations Office (CFRG)
The Office of Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations (CFGR) within Development and Alumni Relations at Babson College provides guidance and assistance to faculty and staff seeking funding from corporations, foundations, and government agencies to support their research and curricular development initiatives. Among the services provided are pre-award activities such as identifying and researching possible funding sources, assisting with cultivation of funding prospects and with proposal development and writing, particularly in the final draft stage, and ultimately with the submission of proposals.
If you would like to explore the possibility of external funding or examine your research agenda please contact Wendy Silverman, Director, CFGR, at x5993.
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Final Products Accepted
The BFRF has accepted the Final Products from the following faculty members who have completed their BFRF sponsored research projects.
I. Elaine Allen, Mathematics and Science, and Nan Langowitz, Management
"Small Business Leadership: A Comparison of Founders Vs. Non-Founder CEOs"
Our initial proposal to the BFRF was for a paper examining the leadership profile of established women entrepreneurs in Massachusetts: 2000 – 2006. Following our submission we added questions to this year’s survey covering leadership capability, management style, organizational structure, and proactive behavior relying on the work of Bateman and Crant (1993) and Covin and Slevin (1989). The survey results for founder vs. non-founder CEOs are quite compelling and, because of this, we focus on these results for our first paper from this database.
Gaurab Bhardwaj, Management
"Growth Possibilities Found, Taken, and Lost"
Growth possibilities found and taken affect long-term growth, profit, and competitiveness, but so do those that were missed. Due to a limited literature on how opportunities are lost, this paper used field data to develop theoretical explanations of the decision-making process behind the phenomenon. The case research method was used to analyze comprehensive archival decision-making data on exploration and exploitation over a 20-year period at the DuPont Company, complemented by contemporaneous newspaper articles. Lost opportunities were analyzed using the counterfactual method of business and economic historians. Choices of which new domains to explore were based on attempts to manage risk from four sources. The decision whether to exploit new growth possibilities generated from exploration was influenced by the following heuristics: risk of action vs. inaction, few vs. many links with current and future businesses, and brief vs. long time horizon. When there were significant deviations between the preferences of powerful individuals and the exploration-exploitation considerations of the organization, they exercised their power to influence choices. These cognitive and power dynamics combined to result in growth possibilities being found, taken, and lost.
Mary Godwyn, History and Society
"The New Faces of Entrepreneurship: Narratives and Images of Minority Women Entrepreneurs"
This book represents an integration of entrepreneurship studies and sociological theory. It is an ethnographic exploration of atypical business owners and an analysis of their businesses. Our objective is to provide visibility to minority women entrepreneurs that reflects their burgeoning numbers and redresses their lack of representation in the literature on entrepreneurship. We apply a multi-dimensional and integrated analysis that addresses the challenges, dilemmas and opportunities experienced by minority women business owners, and also incorporates sociological theory to investigate how race, gender, ethnicity and other minority status pertain to these challenges and their possible solutions. We examine minority women entrepreneurs not merely as generic business owners, but also as individuals with social status characteristics which, under the existing frame of reference, render them non-traditional and atypical – in other words, deviant rather than normative. Our goal is to disseminate the experiences of minority women entrepreneurs in order to challenge, and change, the current archetype of an entrepreneur.
Donna Kelley, Entrepreneurship
"Corporate Entrepreneurship Management Practices: The Influence of Project Leader Characteristics and Level of Innovativeness"
This research examines the relationship between innovation project characteristics and the sponsor or supervisor role played by managers. Our research method draws on interviews of project leaders and managers, and a survey of 89 project leaders from four divisions of large, multinational Korean companies. The results show that project leader empowerment and a managerial sponsor role is associated with the innovativeness and strategic relatedness of a project. In addition, managers are more likely to exert control when projects are less strategically related and when resource requirements are high. This suggests that different sources of project uncertainty imply different managerial roles.
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Community of Science (COS) Funding Opportunities
Babson, with funds from the Babson Faculty Research Fund, subscribes to the Community of Science (COS) database.
The COS Funding Opportunities is the largest, most comprehensive database of available funding to support research and other academic activities. It has more than 22,000 records representing over $33 billion in funding. Grants are available for work in all disciplines—physical sciences, social sciences, life sciences, health & medicine, arts & humanities—and for many purposes, such as research, collaborations, travel, curriculum development, conferences, fellowships, postdoctoral positions, equipment acquisitions, and capital or operating expenses. Searching is easy and intuitive.
If you are looking for external funding ideas, this link to COS is accessible on or off-campus.
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