Description:

Copenhagen Business School invites applications for a postdoc position in entrepreneurship at the Department of Strategy and Innovation. Expected starting date is 1 September 2021.

The Department of Strategy and Innovation has an emphasis on Strategy and Innovation - as indicated by the name - but there is equal emphasis on Entrepreneurship and International Business. The four areas are the pillars that the department is resting on in its teaching and research activities. The number of staff in the department is approximately 80. This includes about 45 faculty members (professors, associate professors, tenure track assistant professors), 7 administrative staff members, and 30 members of staff who are hired on temporary contracts as research assistants, post docs or PhD students.

The department’s ambition is to host an internationally leading environment for research and teaching in strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, and international business. The theoretical foundation for research in these areas is eclectic, combining strategy and/or internationalization theory with insights from economics, sociology, psychology, and economic geography. Methodologically, the department places considerable emphasis on the solid application of empirical methods, featuring qualitative interview studies, surveys, register data, or experiments.

The teaching of the department is very diverse across programs and areas and largely falls within the four research areas of the department, strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship and international business.

The postdoc position is time-limited to 3 years and connected to the research activities of the Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller Chair of Entrepreneurship of which the current holder is Professor José Mata. The focus of the research program of the Chair is to understand the origins of entrepreneurial organizations, their strategies and their implications for the organizations and society.

The program investigates topics such as: What leads individuals to create new ventures? What makes some existing organizations more entrepreneurial than others? Which strategies do people and organizations adopt to become entrepreneurial? What are the implications of the strategies adopted for the success of the ventures? What are the implications of the presence of such organizations for society?

A diverse set of factors will be analyzed to answer the questions above, in particular: The contribution of abilities/capabilities for entrepreneurship and the extent to which these are innate and how they are developed; the geographical origins of people and organizations and their impact upon entrepreneurship, namely the forces affecting the creation of new ventures abroad and entrepreneurship by immigrants; the constraints affecting entrepreneurial organizations and the strategies followed by them to engage resources in their ventures, namely in terms of mobilizing funds, but also employees, and founding and managerial teams.

The analysis will mostly rely on empirical methods, namely on the analysis of: Large-scale microdata sets, in particular the excellent Danish micro-data; Experiments, both in the laboratory and the field; Other types of primary data like own surveys and of secondary data collected by third parties.

The ideal candidate for the position will be a recent PhD graduate with a deep interest in this domain who can provide research support in terms of literature reviews, analyses, “lab manager” role to coordinate other research support, and joining as an author on various projects. Strong technical skills in empirical analysis, in addition to a thorough training in the relevant research literature (strategy and entrepreneurship) are desirable. A solid background in Economics is a plus.

Qualifications :

For further information about the research projects, please contact Professor José Mata:
Information about the department is available at will be in accordance with the Ministry of Finance’s agreement with the Central Academic Organization. A small personal research budget for travel and conference participation will be available.

Information about CBS as a work place is available at