Entrepreneurship - Marketing - Management

Entrepreneurship at JIBS

Over the years, many international entrepreneurship research conferences have been held in Jönköping. As a result of these activities, almost all the leading entrepreneurship scholars in the world have visited us. In 2001, we hosted the world’s leading entrepreneurship conference, the Babson Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research Conference, bringing to Jönköping over 250 entrepreneurship scholars from around the globe.

As a top institution in the field, JIBS has attracted large amounts of outside funding for its entrepreneurship research. The Research Program on Entrepreneurship and Growth in SMEs (PEG) and the Information Centre for Entrepreneurship (ICE) received large amounts with Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation as main financier.

ICE at Jönköping University Library was founded in 1998. Today, ICE has the world’s largest collection of entrepreneurship texts and has developed unique databases. Thanks to this, ICE is well known and attracts attention from scholars around the globe.

The PEG program (Programme on Entrepreneurship and Growth in SMEs ) established a strong research and research education environment in continuing collaboration with leading international partners. Today, our excellence in entrepreneurship research is developed further in several other programs like The Entrepreneurship Lab; INNFORM (Innovative Forms of Organizing); EPRO (Entrepreneurial processes) and the Centre for Family Enterprise and Ownership; the latter being funded by Jönköping University’s largest private benefactor, the Carl-Olof and Jenz Hamrin Foundation.

Marketing

The aim of research in marketing at JIBS is to deepen our understanding of complex relationships between firms in Business Networks. This understanding could be applied to the development of the individual firm as well as constellations of firms. Among the investigated areas are internationalisation, digital technology and supplier development.

Management

The research programme The dynamics of family businesses focuses on succession of generations, with regard to the role of ownership and the chief executive role. Other issues of special interest include the role of accounting in small family businesses and the balancing of different rationalities that may be specific for this type of business firm. We want to understand the interplay between the analytic rationality we expect to find in business firms and the logic of the family as a social institution. The project is inter-disciplinary and consists of researchers and doctoral students from EMM, Accounting and Finance, Law and Economics.

The strategy and leadership research at JIBS consists of many small projects within subjects such as innovative forms of organizing, the role of rhetoric in leadership and strategic change, emotions in radical change processes etc. The common concept is change – the effect on people and businesses in radical change processes and new ways of doing things in the new economy.