UA News

Mark Schankerman joins the Eller College of Management’s McGuire Center as the James and Pamela Muzzy Chair in Entrepreneurship

Professor Mark Schankerman has joined The University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management as the first James and Pamela Muzzy Chair in Entrepreneurship. Schankerman, also a tenured faculty member in the Department of Economics, will serve as executive director of the McGuire Center. In this role, he will oversee a research agenda focused on advancing academic understanding of entrepreneurship, and building collaboration among faculty across UA departments and colleges.

“We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Schankerman to the Eller College and want to thank Jim and Pamela Muzzy for providing us the opportunity to attract another world-class scholar to our faculty,” said Paul Portney, dean of the Eller College of Management. “As holder of the Muzzy Chair, Schankerman will head up a new program in entrepreneurship research, which will further the mission of the McGuire Center and substantially contribute to the academic literature on the subject.”

Schankerman comes to the Eller College from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was professor of economics and research director for the Programme on Productivity, Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights.

“Entrepreneurship draws on elements from a broad array of disciplines and departments, and a good entrepreneurship research program needs to build links among diverse researchers to bring out the complementarities across fields,” Schankerman explained.

He plans to establish an entrepreneurship seminar series so that research faculty with overlapping areas of interest, both at the UA and at other universities, can share their work. Some potential topics of research include the valuation and enforcement of intellectual property (especially patents), the sociology of networks, venture capital finance, contract design, governance and succession in entrepreneurial firms and the impact of incentives on innovation.

Schankerman will also continue his pioneering research in other entrepreneurship-related topics. Among these are technology transfer and the localization of knowledge spillovers, which furthers the mission of the University by creating relationships with private sector companies to enable the development and delivery of innovative new products arising from campus research.

The James and Pamela Muzzy Chair in Entrepreneurship is named for UA business college alumni James (’62) and Pamela (’64) Muzzy. James is a founder and managing director of fixed income manager PIMCO.