Charles (Chuck) Eesley

Bio

Chuck Eesley is an Associate Professor and W.M. Keck Foundation Faculty Scholar in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. As part of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, his research focuses on the role of the institutional and university environment in high-growth, technology entrepreneurship. Prof. Eesley was selected in 2015 as an Inaugural Schulze Distinguished Professor. His National Science Foundation of China and Kauffman award supported research focuses on rethinking how the educational and policy environment shapes the economic and entrepreneurial impact of university alumni. Over the past three years, Prof. Eesley has been playing a growing role in national and international meetings on fostering high-tech entrepreneurship, including advising the U.S. State Department in the Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) program, Chile (CORFO), Taiwan (ITRI), and the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology. He is a member of the Editorial Board for the Strategic Management Journal. Before coming to Stanford, Prof. Eesley completed his Ph.D. at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management in 2009 where he won BPS Division and Kauffman Dissertation Awards for his work on high-tech entrepreneurship in China.

He started his first company while earning a Bachelor's degree from Duke University in 2002 (Biological Basis of Behavior). Prof. Eesley spent 2002-2005 doing research at the Duke University Medical Center (schizophrenia) and Duke’s Center for Health Policy (vaccine innovation). His work has been published among other places in Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, and Biological Psychiatry. Prof. Eesley previously was an entrepreneur (Lobby 10, Sun Dance Genetics, Learning Friends), early employee (NovoEd.com), board member/advisor (Blackbird - acquired by Etsy, LessonFace.com), and investor (Flagship Ventures, Lux Capital). NovoEd.com launched around his online course, which was the first entrepreneurship MOOC and has taught over 200,000 students in over 100 countries. He currently serves as an independent board director on public as well as private companies in online education and AI/Deep Learning. He has given invited talks in forums with the Prime Minister of Slovenia and keynote addresses in Taiwan, China, and Brazil. His research findings have been featured in outlets such as Forbes (2011, 2012, 2013, 2015), Bloomberg, Smart Money, Stanford News, 2012, 2016, Wall Street Journal, SFGate, The Independent, Boston.com (Bill Gates), Inc. magazine, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Academic Appointments

• Associate Professor, Management Science and Engineering

Administrative Appointments

• Organizer, Social Science & Technology Seminar (SIEPR) (2009 - 2018)
• Research Committee, ENT Division, Academy of Management (2012 - Present)
• Research Committee, TIM Division Academy of Management (2015 - Present)
• Lead Steering Committee, West Coast Research Symposium Doctoral Consortium (2011 - 2016)
• Advisory Board, United States Department of State - Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST Network) (2014 - Present)

Honors & Awards

• TUM Research Excellence Award, Technical University of Munich (2018)
• Faculty Affiliate, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment (2017-2019)
• Undergraduate Teaching Award, MS&E (2017)
• Richard Schulze Inaugural Distinguished Professorship Award, Richard Schulze Foundation (2015)
• Faculty Affiliate, Stanford Center for International Development (SCID) (2014-present)
• Kauffman-Nesta Research Grant winner - Randomized Controlled Trials in Entrepreneurship, Kauffman-NESTA (2014)
• Batten Institute Fellow, University of Virginia (UVA) Darden School of Business (2012)
• Research Fund for International Young Scientists, National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (2012)
• Lillie Award, Stanford University (2011, 2012)
• Technology and Innovation Management, IEEE International (2011)
• Best Dissertation Award Winner (Business Policy and Strategy Division), Academy of Management (2010)
• Dissertation Fellowship Award, Kauffman Foundation (2007)
• Best Paper Proceedings, Academy of Management (2005, 2006, 2010, 2012)

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

• Editorial Board, Strategic Management Journal (2015 - Present)
• Member, Academy of Management (2005 - Present)

Professional Education

• PhD, MIT, Sloan School of Management (2009)
• BS, Duke University, Biological Basis of Behavior (2002)

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

My research focuses on the influence of the external environment on entrepreneurship. Specifically, I have sought to be a leader in investigating the types of environments that encourage the founding of high growth, technology-based firms. Although I build on previous work that focuses on individual characteristics, network ties, and strategy, my major contribution is to demonstrate that institutions matter. I have broken new ground in showing that effective institutional change influences who starts firms, not just how many firms are started. I have repeatedly studied entrepreneurship in a single country (China, Chile, Japan, and the U.S.) before and after a major institutional change. My work is divided into three streams: (1) formal institutions (policies and regulations), (2) university and industry environments, and (3) informal institutions (social movements).

STREAM 1: My research in this stream advances theory by introducing novel mechanisms (e.g. barriers to growth and failure, institutional inconsistency), introducing new concepts (e.g. skill adequacy and context relevance) and in theorizing that institutional changes that lower barriers to growth and to failure alter who becomes an entrepreneur, the type of firms, and performance.
STREAM 2: My work in this stream changes the way we think about team composition as well as what characteristics lead to venture performance by linking their impacts to industry environments.
STREAM 3: In this stream, I explored how social movement organizations can change firms.

My research changes the way we think about how the environment – formal institutions, informal institutions, and industry contexts – influences entrepreneurship. I am a leader in situating ventures within environments and showing that interactions between environments and entrepreneurs matter. I am among the first to argue and show that policies that foster high-growth entrepreneurship are different than those that spawn small businesses. If policy leaders wish to foster technology-based start-ups, then we must consider how institutions operate. My research shows that institutional changes can significantly influence the types of firms that are created, who creates them, and how they perform. My research challenges widely accepted ideas about entrepreneurship by highlighting taken-for-granted notions that are incomplete or misleading. My studies call into question the assumption that institutions that make it easier to start firms are unambiguously beneficial, and that experienced, diverse founding teams are always superior. My theoretical contributions include introducing such concepts as institutional barriers to growth, skill adequacy and context relevance. I lead the way in broadening our conception of entrepreneurship beyond the developed North American economies. I have contributed methodologically by (A) showing how to measure talent, (B) collecting data internationally, (C) using randomized field experiments, and (D) analyzing multi-industry databases with state-of-the-art statistics (instrumental variables, differences-in-differences). I have been a pioneer in overcoming the challenges of inferring causality, by finding changes that altered the landscape for entrepreneurship, along with collecting novel data in international settings. I have been fortunate to see an impact of my scholarship, including over 1,574 Google Scholar citations. In future work, I plan to do more studies incorporating software development for data collection and digital platforms for randomized experiments (underway with NovoEd.com, Alibaba, and Qingfan.com) focusing on issues related to strategic change and entrepreneurship training. I was honored to receive the Schulze Distinguished Professorship Award, the goal of which is to "award funding to the country’s most accomplished entrepreneurship scholars who are infusing into their teaching the results of the original and meaningful research they are conducting.”

Projects

• Startup Chile, Stanford University (2/1/2015 - Present)

  Location

  Santiago, Chile

  Collaborators

  • Michael Leatherbee, Assistant Professor, Universidad Catolica

  For More Information:

  • http://startupchile.org/start-up-chile-celebrates-5-years-with-a-growing-entrepreneurial-ecosystem-and-over-a-thousand-startups-supported/
• Failure IS an Option, Stanford University (2/1/2014 - Present)

  Do changes in the consequences of firm failure affect the mix of founding entrepreneurs and the performance of new ventures? We take advantage of a quasi-natural experiment in Japan in which changes to bankruptcy laws eased the social and regulatory consequences of closing a firm and find as follows: a) entrepreneurs with high human and social capital (i.e., those entrepreneurs who graduated from one of the top ten universities in Japan) declare bankruptcy more often than others, b) establish a greater proportion of new firms, and, c) new firm performance improves as entrepreneurs with high human and social capital become more likely to found higher-performing firms. Whereas prior research emphasizes that more lenient bankruptcy laws worsen economic performance by lowering entry barriers and attracting poor-performing firms, our research suggests that more lenient bankruptcy laws can stimulate venture formation among individuals with high human and social capital, leading to higher-performing firms. Overall, we find that reforms leading to more lenient bankruptcy laws encourage better – and not just more – entrepreneurs to found ventures.

  Location

  Tokyo, Japan

  Collaborators

  • Robert Eberhart, Assistant Professor, Santa Clara University

  For More Information:

  • https://oia.stanford.edu/news/4th-annual-stanford-project-japanese-entrepreneurship-conference
• ITRI - Stanford platform, ITRI (2/1/2015)

  On-going collaboration platform with ITRI in Taiwan.

  Location

  Hsinchu, Taiwan

  Collaborators

  • Steven Su, Executive Director, ITRI