For those with a PhD in Entrepreneurship, a career in academia can be broadly classified into two paths:
- Tenure-track roles starting as an assistant professor and working one’s way through an associate professorship, then a full professor, and perhaps a named professor. The last includes titles such as distinguished, endowed, or otherwise ‘special’ professor.
- Non-tenure-track roles such as lecturer, visiting professor, adjunct faculty, instructor, professor of practice, etc. These can be part-time or full-time roles with varying durations and degrees of employment guarantee.
Of course, a post-doc or entrepreneurship research fellowship may be an intermediate milestone for some. For others, it may be teaching positions or project/program manager roles that fill the gap between their PhD and an academic rank.
While an entrepreneurship career in academia is expected to include research, teaching, and service (in that order), it need not limit the ambitions of a young scholar. She can expand her horizons by engaging with the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem such as:
- Incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurship programs affiliated with local universities
- Practitioners (e.g. venture capital firms, corporate venturing arms, etc.) who seek theoretical insights into entrepreneurial success
- Founders and early joiners of new ventures
- Government agencies that promote entrepreneurship
With the field offering new avenues of research for an aspiring entrepreneurship scholar, exciting career paths lie ahead for the next generation.