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Outstanding Young Scientist Rebecca Preller on the Entrepreneurial Team Journey: Collectively Exploring the Venture’s Future

TUM Award for Outstanding Young Scientists goes to Rebecca Preller for her PhD thesis. Picture: private.

 

At this year’s Dies Academicus Rebecca Preller, Post Doc at TUM School of Management and Visiting Scholar at Lund University, Sweden, was awarded the TUM Award for Young Scientists for her PhD thesis, which is awarded annually by the Johannes B. Ortner Foundation. Her doctoral thesis on “The Entrepreneurial Team Journey: Collectively Exploring the Venture’s Future” gives insights into understanding entrepreneurs within their social contexts. In her current research projects, she studies how entrepreneurs develop their ventures together with stakeholders from their professional (e.g., co-founders or business partners) and private (e.g., spouses) sphere. Working on the intersection of management and psychology and drawing on theories and methods from both fields, she looks at how processes, cognition, and emotions at the individual and team level shape new venture development.

The 3 Key Findings to Understanding Entrepreneurial Team Journey

Rebecca’s dissertation provides new insights into the journey of entrepreneurial teams when exploring their ventures’ future. First, it shows how individual entrepreneurial visions held by the founder’s impact the venture’s development over time. It also discusses why and how entrepreneurial opportunities are pursued and how they change over time. Thirdly, the dissertation offers a more nuanced and holistic perspective on important team processes such as information elaboration, team reflection, and decision-making when developing their opportunities in the long-term.

With her practical experiences in the field of entrepreneurship, she supports founders along their entrepreneurial journey, with team issues they might face based on her insights from research, but also based on her experience from co-investing into early stage startups. In her teaching Rebecca draws on the latest research insights by developing interactive exercises that help students to experience an entrepreneurial setting and the challenging tasks entrepreneurs face. Leveraging her consulting background and her experiencing from coaching and co-investing into startups, she integrate insights from real entrepreneurs and managers to challenge research findings and spark the student’s critical thinking.

Rebecca’s Tip for You

 “Immerse yourself into the entrepreneurial community and have fun exploring all the different options it offers – from learning about entrepreneurship in one of the courses by the Entrepreneurship Research Institute or at the UnternehmerTUM, working on projects at the Maker Space, working at a TUM startup or entrepreneurial student club, or even starting your entrepreneurial project.”, recommends Rebecca Preller.

Rebecca’s work was published in The Journal of Organizational Behavior, the Journal of Business Venturing, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. Before starting her PhD at the Entrepreneurship Research Institute at TU Munich, Rebecca Preller did her Bachelor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and her Masters in Consumer Affairs at the TUM School of Management as well as her second Master program Science in Economics and Business Administration at  Aarhus University in Denmark. Furthermore, she gained practical experience for many years as a strategy management consultant on international projects. She has been awarded multiple awards and scholarships, such as Best Paper Award on Entrepreneurial Cognition by the Academy of Management & Kauffman Foundation in 2020, and was recently appointed an Add-On Fellow by the Joachim-Herz-Foundation.

 

Links:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rebecca_Preller

https://mediatum.ub.tum.de/1470252

Check out her latest publication:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1042258720978386

The post Outstanding Young Scientist Rebecca Preller on the Entrepreneurial Team Journey: Collectively Exploring the Venture’s Future appeared first on Technical University of Munich – School of Management.

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