Dear Colleagues,
Why and how do some entrepreneurial efforts generate lasting societal impact while others stall, fade, or produce unintended consequences? What mechanisms explain divergent impact trajectories among seemingly similar ventures? How do individual motivations, organizational dynamics, and institutional contexts interact to shape the scale and durability of societal outcomes?
As scholars increasingly seek to address grand societal challenges, these questions have become central to entrepreneurship and management research. While work on social, sustainable, and environmental entrepreneurship is expanding rapidly, there remains a need for a more integrated understanding of the drivers and mechanisms that motivate, enable, and sustain entrepreneurship for the public good. To explore these issues, we invite you to join us for the following PDW at the 2026 Academy of Management Annual Meeting:
Cultivating Entrepreneurship for Public Good: Understanding the Drivers and Mechanisms of Impact Entrepreneurship
�� Saturday, August 1, 2026
�� 10:00–11:30 AM EDT
�� Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Salon L
This interactive workshop brings together leading scholars to examine entrepreneurship for the public good through the lens of impact entrepreneurship. Together, we will explore questions such as:
- Why do some individuals develop a strong commitment to societal impact while others do not?
- How do organizational structures, governance systems, and cultures enable or constrain impact-oriented entrepreneurial action?
- How do institutions, ecosystems, and public policies shape opportunities for entrepreneurship that address societal challenges?
- Under what conditions do entrepreneurial efforts translate into meaningful, scalable, and enduring societal outcomes rather than isolated successes or unintended consequences?
Through panel discussions and facilitated roundtables, participants will identify theoretical gaps, generate new research ideas, explore promising methodological approaches, and build connections with scholars advancing entrepreneurship research that matters for society.
Panelists
- Jeffery McMullen (Imperial College London)
- Stephanie Fernhaber (Butler University)
- Thomas Dean (Colorado State University)
- Todd Moss (University of Oklahoma)
- Siddharth Vedula (Miami University)
- Jeffrey York (University of Colorado Boulder)
Organizers
- Sohrab Soleimanof (Louisiana State University)
- Gideon Markman (Louisiana State University)
- Theodore Waldron (Louisiana State University)
- Tyge Payne (Oklahoma State University)
Our goal is to spark a broader scholarly conversation on impact entrepreneurship with a focus on advancing meaningful societal outcomes. We hope this PDW will help shape a research agenda that examines not only who engages in impact entrepreneurship and what they do, but also how entrepreneurial efforts translate into sustained, scalable, and measurable societal impact over time. We also aim for this workshop to serve as a starting point for ongoing collaboration among scholars, including the development of seminars, special issues, and other collective initiatives that advance research on entrepreneurship for the public good.
If you are interested in entrepreneurship's role in addressing grand challenges and generating lasting societal impact, we would be delighted to have you join us.
We look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia.
Best regards,
Sohrab
On behalf of the Organizing Team
Sohrab Soleimanof, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship
Ourso Professorship of Entrepreneurial Education
Associate Editor, Journal of Small Business Management
Stephenson Department of Entrepreneurship & Information Systems
E. J. Ourso College of Business
Louisiana State University