Since 2014, Department of Strategy and Innovation is the proud host of a very prestigious donation from the ‘A. P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond til almene Formaal’.
The Foundation has donated 40 million Danish kroner to the establishment of an Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship and thus provided CBS with the opportunity to strengthen its research and education activities within entrepreneurship.
José Mata is the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Professor of Entrepreneurship at Copenhagen Business School. He holds a Doctorate in Business Economics from Minho University. Before joining CBS, José Mata taught at HEC Lausanne, the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon, and at Lisbon University. He also worked for the Bank of Portugal and served as President of the National Statistical Institute of Portugal.
José Mata’s interests center on the dynamics of markets and firms’ strategies. His research, spanning over the areas of Entrepreneurship, Strategy and International Business, has appeared in major international outlets such as the American Economic Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Research Policy, or Strategic Management Journal.
The Philosophy of the Chair
In the current economy, entrepreneurship is a crucial activity not only for the risk-taking founders of new companies but for most participants in a modern economy. A larger proportion of the workforce is now employed in jobs where workers’ abilities, such as physical power, endurance, or precision, are directed by superiors. In modern economies, most employees constantly need to make decisions about their job functions. This tends to erase the distinction between the entrepreneur – as the founder of companies – and the ‘ordinary’ man, and widens the need for entrepreneurial skills to now also include a major part of the employees.
With this in mind, it is no wonder that entrepreneurship is now on everybody’s mind. The promotion of entrepreneurship has become a top priority in most societies. Education of the citizens to take on personal responsibilities of the entrepreneurial kind, as business founders or as idea generators or creative problem solvers in existing organizations, is on the agenda of all educational institutions. In addition, research on phenomena such as university spin-offs, serial entrepreneurship, venture capital, social entrepreneurship, personal traits of entrepreneurs, organizational creativity, and public support of start-ups, are all receiving growing interest from academic researchers.