The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is a new initiative to focus and expand the work on entrepreneurship and innovation at Fuqua.
Conducting world-class research and integrating it into our educational program will be the hallmark of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Fuqua. The center will contribute both to the advancement of knowledge and the practice of entrepreneurship. We expect the center to help place Fuqua among a small handful of business schools known for research excellence and research-based education in entrepreneurship and innovation.
Mission
The mission of the center is to advance the scholarship, teaching and practice of entrepreneurship and innovation.
Goals
The overarching goal of the center is to be, and to be recognized as, one of the premier institutions in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation. We believe we can accomplish this goal by leveraging three essential ingredients:
- Duke’s position (both geographic and intellectual)
- Strong student interest
- Critical mass of research faculty (most of whom are recent additions to Fuqua.)
The guiding vision of the center, and one which distinguishes it from entrepreneurship initiatives at most universities, consists of two core ideas: a strong, interdisciplinary research foundation, and a multifaceted integration of research, teaching and practice. This vision is articulated in a set of more concrete objectives that will inform the center’s activities in the areas of research, teaching and practice.
Leadership
Wesley Cohen
Faculty Director
Frederick C. Joerg Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Economics, Law and ManagementAfter a year as Research Fellow in Industrial Organization at the Harvard Business School and twenty years teaching in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Wesley Cohen (Ph.D., Economics, Yale University, 1981) joined the faculty of the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University as Professor of Economics and Management in September 2002 and was named the Frederick C. Joerg Distinguished Professor of Business Administration in April, 2004. He also holds secondary appointments in Duke’s Department of Economics and School of Law, and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Cohen is a leading applied economist in the area of technological change and R&D. Much of his research has focused on the determinants of innovative activity and performance both within and across industries, considering the roles of firm size, market structure, firm learning, knowledge flows, university research and the means that firms use to protect their intellectual property. In recent years, much of his work has focused on the economics and management of intellectual property.
He has published in numerous scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, Science, The Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Research Policy and the Strategic Management Journal. He also co-edited the recently published volume, Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy.
He served for five years as a Main Editor for Research Policy and recently served on the National Academies’ Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Knowledge-Based Economy, and on the National Academies' Panel on Research and Development Statistics at the National Science Foundation. He has taught courses on the economics of technological change, industrial organization economics, policy analysis, organizational behavior, corporate strategy, entrepreneurship and the management of intellectual capital.
Jon Fjeld
Executive Director
Professor of the Practice of Management
Jon Fjeld has spent over twenty years in marketing, engineering and general management in start-ups and public companies, as well as five years in academia.
From December, 2000, until July, 2004, he served as vice president of engineering for Align Technology in Santa Clara, CA. Between 1995 and 2000, he served as CEO of two RTP venture backed firms: Geomagic, a 3D software company and NetEdge Systems, a data networking equipment company. Prior to that, Fjeld spent 13 years at IBM, where he served in a number of management and executive positions within the networking and software business units. He began his professional career as an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Duke University.
Fjeld holds a Ph.D. and MA in philosophy from the University of Toronto, an MBA from Duke University, an MS in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in mathematics and philosophy from Bishop's University.
Howie Rhee '04
Managing Director
Howie Rhee is the Managing Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. In his role, he develops and maintains the relationship between the center and the entrepreneurial community both locally and globally.
Prior to coming to Fuqua, Howie developed extensive entrepreneurial experience in a variety of industries including software, media, energy and biotechnology, and executive search. For several years, he has worked on technology startups. He helped over a hundred entrepreneurs develop and grow their companies, while at the Council for Entrepreneurial Development, the largest entrepreneurial support organization in the nation. Previously, he co-founded Internet Games Corporation, a leading games provider, that was acquired by Go2Net in the late 90s. Howard also worked in marketing and strategy for TechTrader, a software company based in Washington D.C, and earlier in his career, he worked at MicroStrategy in product development. Howard is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.Howie was the president of the MIT Club of RTP (2004-2007), and is now a board member of Leadership Triangle, a non-profit created to build leadership capacity to foster regional awareness and cooperation in the Triangle. He is on the Board of Directors for the Global MIT Enterprise Forum which has 24 chapters around the world.
Contact Howie at hwr2@duke.edu