There are a number of academics and others working on research projects that fall under the Endowed Chair. These include strongly coupled affiliations as well as more ad hoc collaborations, both internal and external to CBS. The following people are currently involved in the activities of the Chair:
José Mata, Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Professor of Entrepreneurship
José Mata took up the position as the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Professor of Entrepreneurship at Copenhagen Business School in 2021 and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience from extensive research in entrepreneurship. His research spans not only entrepreneurship but also strategy and international business. José’s interest in entrepreneurship is clearly reflected in his PhD on firm creation and dissolution. He earned his Doctorate in Business Economics from Minho University in Portugal
Before joining CBS, José taught at HEC Lausanne, the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon, and Lisbon University. He has also worked for the Bank of Portugal and served as President of the National Statistical Institute of Portugal. His current fields of interest include women and immigrant entrepreneurs, and he is a pioneer in the use of Linked Employer Employee Data (LEED) in his research.
His publications have appeared in highly prestigious journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Research Policy, and Strategic Management Journal.
Joshua Bedi, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Superior
Joshua is a former postdoctoral researcher under the Chair. He has now returned to his native United States and has taken up a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. His research focuses on entrepreneurship, with a special emphasis on immigrant entrepreneurship. His work covers, among other things, the impact of immigrant-related labour market constraints and immigration policy and its influence on entrepreneurial probabilities. His research has been published in journals such as Small, Business Economics, Public Choice and Constitutional Political Economy.
Fabio Busicchia, Postdoc
Fabio took up the position of postdoc in September 2025. He comes to us from Politecnico di Milano School of Management in Italy.
Prior to joining CBS,he earned his PhD in Management Engineering from Politecnico di Milano School of Management, a leading technical university in Italy.
His research lies at the intersection of firms’ entry strategies, survival in nascent industries, and the pivotal role of prior experience—whether from established firms or entrepreneurial founding teams.
Javier Garcia Clemente, PhD Fellow
Javier is a PhD Fellow under the Chair where he started in 2023. His previous education is in Economics and Quantitative Methods. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics, a Master’s degree in Economics and Computer Science, and a Master’s degree in Health Economics. Javier’s main research interests lie in the field of labour economics and entrepreneurship. His thesis proposal, which is funded by a Carlsberg Foundation grant, focuses on the study of immigrant entrepreneurship using Danish registered data. He is working under the supervision of José Mata and Ali Mohammadi. In addition to his research activities, Javier also has teaching experience in undergraduate courses in Statistics and Economics. His primary research areas are in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial motivations, self-employment, and labor economics.
Orsola Garofalo, Associate Professor, CBS and Research Affiliate at the CEPR
Orsola’s research interests lie at the intersection of decision-making and governance in organisations, with a special focus on gender and entrepreneurial firms. She is trained as an experimental economist, and consequently her main methodological approach is laboratory and field experiments to understand behavioural mechanisms and dynamics within organisations, in order to derive implications for entrepreneurship and management. Her research has been published in leading academic journals such as Organization Science, Management Science, and Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
Johannes Kleinhempel, Postdoc
Johannes is a former postdoctoral researcher under the Chair. Prior to moving to Denmark, he was a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science and obtained his PhD in Business and Economics at the University of Groningen. Before commencing graduate studies, he worked in product and project management at a German high-tech start-up.
Johannes’ main research interest is comparative international entrepreneurship. His research focuses on the contextual drivers of entrepreneurship and examines specifically the underlying mechanisms through which socio-cultural conditions shape entrepreneurial action. In doing so, he draws on insights from management, economics, and sociology, and leverages advanced econometric methods to address questions of theoretical and practical relevance.
His research has been published in leading journals, including Organization Science, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and has been covered by outlets such as Forbes and the LSE Business Review. His ongoing research has received multiple international recognitions, such as nominations for the prestigious dissertation awards at AOM (ENT NFIB 2021), AIB (2021), and EIBA (2018-2021). He regularly presents at leading international conferences, such as AOM, AIB, BCERC, EIBA, and SMS. In August 2025, he took up his new position as Assistant Professor at Warwick University in the UK.
Emma Lappi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Business Development and Technology at Aarhus University
Emma is a former postdoctoral researcher under the Chair. Emma’s research focuses on entrepreneurship, especially the role of human capital, governmental regulations, and policies in various entrepreneurial outcomes. In her work, she uses large-scale datasets, such as Swedish employee-employer data, combined with the latest relevant econometric methods. Her work has been published in journals such as Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Small Business Economics, and Research Policy. She was the recipient of the Young Researcher Award from the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum in 2024.
Ali Mohammadi, Associate Professor
Ali is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Ali’s research focuses on the relationship between financing, entrepreneurship and innovation. His primary research areas are in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, crowdfunding, finance and innovation, and intellectual property rights, utilising mainly quantitative research. He teaches courses on Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Finance, Strategic Management, and Managerial Economics.
Ali’s research has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Small Business Economics and Industrial and Corporate Change. He is a regular reviewer for journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Journal of business Venturing, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. He also has experience in managing and conducting externally funded research projects.
As well as his affiliation with CBS, Ali also has collaborations with the Centre of Excellence in Science and Innovation Studies (CESIS), and the Royal Institute of Technology KTH.
Vera Rocha, Professor in Entrepreneurship
Vera Rocha is a Professor of Entrepreneurship and her research addresses issues related to entrepreneurship, strategic human capital, and/or diversity, and inequality. In particular, she is interested in understanding: a) What drives some individuals (but not others) to become entrepreneurs? b) How can entrepreneurial activity affect both individual careers and society at large? c) How do firms mobilise key resources such as human capital, and how do employees and firms impact each other?
To study these questions, Vera often leverages advanced econometric methods and employer-employee linked data covering the population of firms and employees within a country (to date, Denmark and Portugal), which she increasingly seeks to complement with other data and methods (e.g., qualitative data, surveys, or experiments). Her work has been published in some of the highest-ranked journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Personnel Psychology, and Research Policy and Journal of Management Studies. She currently serves on the editorial board of Industry and Innovation as Co-Editor-in-Chief and the editorial review boards of Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.
Johannes Ross, Postdoc
Johannes is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Chair. Before joining CBS in 2022, he earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Hamburg. His research includes behavioural and experimental economics with a focus on cheating behaviour. His primary research areas of interest include cheap talk and dishonesty in experiments, tax evasion in the sharing economy, externalities in auction markets and the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on altruism. Johannes has published several papers in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Currently, he is working on an empirical study in collaboration with José Mata, investigating the relationship between the sequence of education and working in the labour market.
Greta Serpente, Postdoc
Since Autumn 2024, Greta has held a postdoctoral at CBS affiliated with the Chair. She previously completed her PhD in Management at Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Italy. Her research interests centre on entrepreneurship and innovation. The research project she is currently engaged in is about entrepreneurship education and training by entrepreneurial support organisations. She is currently conducting research on Entrepreneurial Support Organizations (ESOs) in Denmark, with a particular focus on the challenges faced by female and immigrant entrepreneurs and evaluating how participation in entrepreneurship support programmes can help address these barriers. She is currently in the initial stages of data collection, with the research guidelines focused on addressing two main objectives: (1) the extent to which participation in accelerator programmes improve the performance of start-ups, and the conditions in which this improvement is more pronounced and (2) whether this effect differs between female and male entrepreneurs, and between migrant and native entrepreneurs.
Greta is also working on three papers that, among other things, investigate whether pre-incubation programmes foster new venture creation, whether career preferences drive entrepreneurial learning and investigating support organizations as providers of entrepreneurial education and training.
Valentina Tartari, Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg Professor at House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics, Associate Professor
Her research interests lie in, among other things, the role universities have in stimulating local entrepreneurship. Her work has been published in leading innovation and management journals, such as the Academy of Management Journal, Research Policy and the Journal of Management Studies. Valentina has been part of the SEI (Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Innovation) Executive Committee since 2019. She currently is also serving on the Executive Committee for the TIM (The Technology and Innovation Management) division at the Academy of Management for the period 2024-2029. In addition to her role as Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg Professor at House of Innovation at Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, Valentina also holds a part-time position at CBS.
Shibo Zhou, Postdoc
Shibo is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Chair. His primary research areas are in user innovation, platforms, entrepreneurship and the economics of science but his research interests also include corporate innovation, knowledge sourcing, Ecosystems & Platforms, and research methods. Shibo is currently working on user innovation in the healthcare sector and innovation from user reviews and updates in the creative industries. Shibo obtained his PhD in Management from Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology. Previously, he obtained an MSc in Management at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam and a BSc- in Psychology at Peking University in China.