MEET DEAN SHEPHERD

ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROFESSOR’S RESEARCH MATCHES MENDOZA’S MISSION

Dean Shepherd was back home near Melbourne, Australia, celebrating his birthday in 2009 when the Black Saturday bushfires struck the southern state of Victoria. With combustive energy that fire experts rated equivalent to 1,500 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, the country’s deadliest fires burned through a million acres, killing 173 people, injuring 414 and displacing 7,500.

Incredibly, Shepherd’s elderly aunt, who lived in the heart of the affected area, was spared.

“Auntie Shirley is disabled with a very bad hip,” recalled Shepherd, the new Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship. “But that night, she decided to go and play bingo. If she hadn’t, she’d be dead because her house was wiped out — she lost her dogs, her livestock, all of her belongings. Everything.”

Because of his aunt, Shepherd, a prolific entrepreneurial researcher, paid close attention to the 
recovery efforts of the disaster. Ultimately, those 
efforts inspired him to examine entrepreneurship that happens immediately after a disaster, which he refers to as “spontaneous venturing.”

In the days and even hours after the fire, entrepreneurs provided temporary housing, rental equipment, clean-up services, specialized legal advice and other needed products and services. Shepherd’s subsequent research revealed these ventures were focused on 
alleviating suffering and hardship, and often dissolved or evolved after initial launch.

“What’s really interesting is that the entrepreneurs are also victims,” he explains. “But because they are local, they have the local knowledge and expertise and know the local customs that outside resources don’t.”

Further, experienced entrepreneurs who become victims of disaster cope better when they use their skills to help. Conversely, “If you have experience and you don’t act, your individual functioning is a lot worse. So it’s kind of like, use it or lose it.”

His disaster research led Shepherd to examine entrepreneurship in areas with scarce resources, such as the slums of India. This type of innovation also focuses on providing community benefits. Examples are an economical gas-based water pump that uses a moped engine to lift water and a rigged lamp to power a gas stove for use in power failures.

Shepherd perhaps is most regarded for his research on resilience and especially the complexities of entrepreneurial failure. This was inspired by his father’s business failing suddenly and drastically. Shepherd noticed his father’s grief over his business was similar to grieving a death. His research reveals that, contrary to prevailing thought, learning from entrepreneurial failure is complex and not immediate. Instead, an entrepreneur needs to address inherent grief and then find meaning from failure.

Overall, through his research and his teaching, Shepherd aims to offer insight to entrepreneurs and stakeholders. “Entrepreneurship is a difficult topic because it involves the pursuit of opportunity in highly uncertain environments,” he explains. “I hope to teach my students to think optimally under trying circumstances and to be resilient in the face of setbacks.”

TOP RESEARCHER

A recent study identified Dean Shepherd as the No. 1 contributing author of entrepreneurship research worldwide. “Contributing Forces in Entrepreneurship Research,” published by the Journal of Small Business Management, examined articles published in leading journals between 2002 and 2013. Shepherd was the most prolific author with 54 articles and the most impactful.