Rhanbarth academic co-coordinated entrepreneurship event in Liverpool

Dr Fariba Darabi, Senior Lecturer in Management, co-facilitated an event, ‘Learning to fly: Entrepreneurship research as a living process of inquiry’ held at the University of Liverpool’s Brett Centre for Entrepreneurship. The event was funded by the European Council of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ECSB) and the British Academy of Management’s (BAM) Research Methodology and Entrepreneurship Special Interest Groups. It brought together 60 academics from a range of disciplines to develop new insights to the question ‘How can we make inquiry into entrepreneurship more interesting and purposeful’?

Academics from different disciplines, including management, education, and anthropology, shared a range of insights to this question. Structured through a series of 'Creative Acts', delegates re-discovered, re-explored, and re-engaged with what inquiry means, uncovering practices on what it means to be curious and whether and how researchers view entrepreneurship as a field of inquiry. Delegates were inspired to think critically and engage reflexively with their own research practice.

The workshop challenged the conventional canons of entrepreneurship scholarship, providing an opportunity to develop a more contextual and processual account of different methods of inquiry in social sciences.