The inaugural Darden Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research Conference will bring together leading scholars in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation. This event will advance research in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation and explore the implications of these fields' evolution. The conference is being sponsored by Darden's Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (www.batteninstitute.org). For more information on the conference or to submit a paper, click here.

Taught by the former executive director of the Batten Institute and the current Batten Executive-in-Residence, this course reveals how to best lead organic growth, even within a large corporation. It is based on the findings of pioneering research (supported by the Batten Institute) about the mindset and practices of (organic) growth leaders.

This course for corporate leaders offers insights into how to address personal barriers to innovation, lead the process of invention within a company, and drive collaboration that leads to innovation. Participants come away with a 90-day innovation action plan, ready to be implemented upon completion of the course.

This elective is offered to executive MBAs who desire to learn research-based strategies for how to think like an entrepreneur, a mindset which can readily be applied to advantage within the corporate setting. It can help executives learn how to successfully lead new ventures and innovate new products and business models within their organizations, while minimizing risk and creating value for the enterprise.

This course helps executives identify concrete ways to create and capture value across the value chain and develop strategies to lead corporate transformation, innovation, and growth. Using strategic analysis and frameworks, it offers guidance in how to approach competitive challenges and maintain and sustain business growth.

The Batten Institute seeks to foster entrepreneurship in emerging regions through various means, including entrepreneurship curriculum development, sponsorship of entrepreneurial forums locally and abroad, regional collaborations and research partnerships, conferences, and educational materials created for educators and practitioners. Through the work of Darden Professor S. Venkataraman, the Institute has extended the international reach of Darden's work in entrepreneurship. In partnership with the Journal of Business Venturing and the Indian Business School, the Institute co-sponsored a December 2006 conference on Entrepreneurship in Emerging Regions in Hyderabad, India. The Journal of Business Venturing (JBV) published a special edition based on the materials generated at this event.

The Institute partnered with the Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR), Financial Management Association, the Emerging Markets Review, and State Street Corporation to organize the following conferences on emerging markets: Valuation in Emerging Markets (2002), Investing in Emerging Markets (2003), Innovations in Portfolio Management (2004), Emerging Markets Finance (2005). Intellectual capital generated by these conferences include CD-ROM sets of the highlights of the conferences, special editions of Emerging Markets Review, and monographs that summarized the practical issues in the areas of valuation, investing and finance in emerging markets.

This doctoral retreat, led by Professor Saras Sarasvathy of the Darden Graduate School of Business and Professor Poul Rind Christensen of the Aarhus School of Business (Denmark), was devoted to the exploration of a new agenda for entrepreneurship research. Until recently, this relatively young discipline centered around the recognition and discovery of opportunities. However, entrepreneurship can also be researched with a focus on how expert entrepreneurs make new opportunities, firms, markets and institutions. Intellectual inspiration for the retreat came from the ideas found in Herbert A. Simon's "The Sciences of the Artificial," Nelson Goodman's "Ways of Worldmaking," and James M. Buchanan and Viktor J. Vanberg's "The Market as a Creative Process."

The Batten Institute's collaboration with best-selling author and Batten Fellow Jim Collins began with the development of an educational DVD companion to Collin's bestselling book Good to Great for use by graduate and undergraduate instructors in the classroom. The partnership with Jim Collins culminated in a colloquium at Darden, during which Collins outlined the eight principles of greatness which his research uncovered, shared leadership insights, and examined the effects of turbulence on a company's decline or enduring success. Darden's partnership with Jim Collins led to a related interview with him on With Good Reason on 6/14/08.

The Batten Institute's collaboration with best-selling author and Batten Gerd Gigerenzer, Batten Fellow, delivered four lectures on his groundbreaking work on bounded rationality: "The Illusion of Certainty: Learning to Live with Uncertainty," "Uniformed Consent: Innumerate Physicians and Scared Patients," "How Intuition Works," and "Less Is More: The Benefits of Cognitive Limits." Gigerenzer is director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and professor of psychology at the Free University of Berlin. A pioneer of a balanced assessment of the methods used by both humans and animals to make inferences about their environment under constraints of time, knowledge, and computational capacities, Gigerenzer has used his insights into the psychology of decision making to improve managerial techniques in operation research, quantitative analysis, and marketing.

As a 2003-2004 Batten Fellow, Reinhard Selten, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics, delivered two lectures on experimental economics, bounded rationality, and game theory. In the first talk, Selten presented his qualitative version of game theory, which he developed in the 1970s while consulting for the Department of Defense. The second talk surveyed recent empirical insights into how humans approach and perceive decision problems. By introducing the concept of subgame perfection, Selten provided the foundation for a systematic analysis of strategic interactions in a dynamic context. His foundational work has opened new avenues in the game-theoretic analysis of predatory pricing and deterrence from market entry, credibility in economic policy, oligopolies, and the economics of information.