Faculty Spotlight | Dr. Austin Brown

Business Matters with Massey: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Dr. Austin Brown: Howdy! I’m Dr. Austin Brown and I’m an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship. I teach our ETP 3000 Foundations in Entrepreneurship course, as well as two sections of First Year Seminar in the Fall. I spent my early years in Baltimore, MD (Go Ravens!), but much of my life has taken place in the beautiful state of North Carolina. After wrapping up high school in Greensboro, NC, I set off to the small mountain town of Cullowhee to do my undergraduate degree at Western Carolina University. Not knowing exactly what I wanted to do in life, I ended up building a custom liberal studies degree for my Bachelor of Science (it was a mix of bio-chemistry, politics, philosophy, and economics) and from there went on to work as a viticulturalist in the wine industry.

After a year spent mostly alone on tractors, I found myself missing the intellectual rigor of trying to understand the world and decided I should go back to school for my Ph.D. At that point, I took on a yearlong pre-doctoral fellowship under one of my former professors, Dr. Ed Lopez, at Western Carolina, and from there found my way to a Ph.D. program in Entrepreneurship at Baylor University. While in Texas for my Ph.D., I met my awesome wife, Paige, who is to thank for the adoption of our cat, Appa. He’s genuinely the greatest cat I’ve ever met, but still a terrible roommate. The three of us now live in East Nashville near 5 Points and absolutely love it.

BMWM: Can you tell us about your research and any current projects you may be working on?

AB: I research the phenomenon of entrepreneurial ecosystems, which is another way of saying I study how the environment surrounding entrepreneurs shapes the new endeavors they pursue. Researchers have spent a long time trying to piece together what specifically matters in this equation, and one of my current projects is an attempt to organize the insights of this literature. For those interested in the nitty-gritty, I’ve rounded up about 240 research articles on aspects of entrepreneurial ecosystems, read them multiple times and drawn-out key insights on how the ecosystem functions. Then, using these insights, I find key points of overlap in the insights and distill them into a new theoretical perspective on how ecosystems work on the day-to-day, and across long periods of time. My hope is that the project can be used to improve our field of research, as well as in the classroom as a teaching tool, to help aspiring entrepreneurs better understand the implications of their surroundings.

In working on this project, I also realized that we have a really limited understanding of how ecosystems influence entrepreneurship at the individual level. Most of what we know has looked at effects at the populations level, such as what conditions seem to increase new venture founding rates.

While that’s good and insightful, entrepreneurship ultimately happens when individuals put ideas out into the world and develop them with their peers, meaning that it’s really important to gain some understanding of how the environment changes the process of coming up with new ideas! To explore this, I use a nifty (often underappreciated) technique called a verbal protocol experiment. It’s like a normal experiment, but you ask your subjects to think out loud as they complete it, and that stream of consciousness is what we’re interested in. Essentially, we recruited 32 entrepreneurs, presented them with scenarios containing distinct ecosystem compositions and asked them to think out loud as they came up with new venture ideas. We then take all that thinking data (about 450 pages of interview transcripts) and look for patterns or differences in their responses.

BMWM: How would you describe your teaching style?

AB: The specifics of how I teach will depend on the class, but in general something I value in every course is teaching with humility. A wise scholar by the name of Peter Klein once told me something to the effect of, “I started my Ph.D. to know more about how the world works and all I got was more confused.” I think all too often students come out of college thinking they are done learning, or look at the words of professors, or perhaps “experts” on television programs, as infallible, complete and fully accurate. And this isn’t to knock professors. We qualify as experts for good reasons. We’ve studied a topic longer, in greater detail and from a particularly unique perspective than others. In plenty of cases, we’ve amassed a sufficient amount of evidence to demonstrate that our knowledge is indeed accurate. But expertise is by no means equitable to total or perfect knowledge, and as much of (my favorite scholar) Karl Weick’s work shows, when people with expertise become too confident in the completeness of their knowledge, crisis ensues.

This is to say that when we fail to have willingness to doubt our own understanding of the world or admit when we are not entirely sure how and why phenomenon unfold in particular ways, we are doing a disservice to our ability to seek out more information and better comprehend the shades of gray that exist in our world. None of us, no matter how knowledgeable or experienced, are ever done learning and that’s because our world is complicated. So often, we’re thrown off course by people who promise us the answers or make claims to understand something they really don’t. And I suspect that one of the best remedies to people falling victim to this, or even doing it themselves, is to set the example that it’s a good thing to not have all the answers. So, I do my best in all of my classes to admit when I’m not sure about something, and the coolest part of this is that it opens a door for me, a fairly seasoned student at this point, to walk through alongside my students on a path of inquiry.

BMWM: From your perspective, what makes the Massey College of Business unique?

AB: You know, just in talking to folks here, you start to get a sense that our college has done something right, but I find it can be a little tricky to put your finger on what it is. That is, until you talk to faculty from other schools! When I chat with colleagues from different universities (and don’t get me wrong here, these are great faculty members at all around great schools—they’re just not quite what we’ve got here), what sets Massey College of Business apart is the genuine sense of humanness we’ve achieved across the organization.

What I mean by that is the people here seem to collectively value the humanity of one  another—the nuances, the imperfections and the potential to grow—and I feel that’s true from the newest members of our team (like me!) all the way to our leadership. The culture here encourages people to care about one another beyond production outputs alone, and this in turn creates a really rich collaborate environment. I see this spillover to students, too. I don’t get a sense that they’re competing with one and other in class, which is awesome because cutthroat competition doesn’t produce learning for a lot of us. Instead, there is an air of excitement around meeting people where they’re at and doing what we can to lift them up from there. It’s a “rising tides lift all boats” attitude rather than a “sink or swim” approach.

BMWM: What advice do you have for new business students?

AB: Make time to take courses in non-business disciplines. Business classes are great and will help you understand the systems we build to manage resource allocation, production and exchange. But business is inherently interdisciplinary, and your ability to make good decisions in business will only ever improve when you broaden your knowledge of the world we live in.

Unfortunately, I think the way higher education has been structured over time gives the impression that knowledge disciplines are largely disconnected—only nurses and scientists need those classes, only engineers need these and so on—and that’s completely inaccurate. My current research in entrepreneurship is deeply rooted in ecology research. Maybe you remember learning things like the food web in science class? I’m working to improve our understanding of similar systems related to new ventures. The way I think about human systems and networks has been profoundly influenced by the time I spent in Organic Chemistry learning how molecules interact with each other in space.

What I’m saying here is that you should make time to study a diversity of disciplines because it equips you with new mental models (explanations of how certain things work in different contexts) that you can abstractly apply in new settings, such as business disciplines. On top of helping improve your critical thinking, the courses will either enrich your technical abilities in an area that may interest you, reveal an unexpected area of interest or convince you that the topic just isn’t your cup of tea—which are all great things!

And if the reason you hesitate to do this is a fear of failure or a historical record of struggle in the topic, that’s all the more reason to try. Sometimes you come across a great teacher that helps completely change your attitude towards a subject. After nearly failing Algebra II in middle school and subsequently avoiding math like the plague (except for Physics I in college, which I did indeed fail the first time around), I was fortunate enough to take a logic course my junior year with a wonderful philosophy professor. To my surprise, the content of the course, namely our unit on symbolic logic, transformed the way I think about math.

I’ve since passed physics and become quite comfortable with math that is light years beyond Algebra II. Failure and struggle are also where you will make the greatest leaps in your self-development in college. These experiences teach us that imperfection the first time around doesn’t mean you’re bad, will never be good, and are better off throwing in the towel. All it means is that we need to find new ways of approaching the content—new ways of thinking about the problem at hand. The world needs more people who can do this, and one of the best ways to do this is to step out of a narrow focus and “smell the roses” that have bloomed in other disciplines!