Erik Monsen joined the University of Vermont's School of Business Administration in August 2014 as an Associate Professor and the Steven Grossman Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship, and in January 2015 he was awarded a secondary appointment as Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in UVM's College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. His career has crossed disciplinary (engineering, management, economics) and geographic (US, Germany, UK) boundaries on his journey from designing better aircraft to designing better entrepreneurial organizations. Building on personal experiences as an aerospace engineer and business consultant in American and European aerospace organizations, his mission is to aid technology and research organizations, both public and private, to become more entrepreneurial and create new value for society and the planet.
Before coming to UVM, Erik was a Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde Business School in Glasgow, Scotland, from 2010 to 2014 and a Senior Research Fellow in the Entrepreneurship, Growth, and Public Policy Group at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena, Germany, from 2005 to 2010. Erik earned his Ph.D. in Organization Management at the University of Colorado at Boulder (2005), where he also earned an M.B.A. in Entrepreneurship and Technology Management (2001). Before researching entrepreneurship, he was an aerospace engineering researcher (B.S., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1991; M.S., Stanford University, 1992) at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Braunschweig, Germany, from 1994 to 1999.
Instead of designing better aircraft, Erik now researches how to design better entrepreneurial organizations from the employee perspective. His current research examines how and why employees act entrepreneurially (or not!), and in particular, how and why scientists and engineers choose to commercialize their research (or not!). His research, which pushes the boundaries of existing theories regarding organizational strategy and employee decision making, has been published in Journal of Product Innovation Management, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Small Business Economics Journal, Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Economic Psychology and the Zeitschrift für betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung. He also serves on editorial review boards for Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Small Business Economics Journal, and Organization Research Methods. In the past he has served as an associate editor for the Small Business Economics Journal.
Erik has taught courses in entrepreneurship, technology commercialization and strategic management at the University of Strathclyde (Scotland), the University of Jena (Germany), the Leipzig Graduate School of Management (Germany), the International Graduate Business School Zagreb (Croatia), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA). Here at UVM, he teaches courses in entrepreneurial business models, new product development, and technology commercialization at the undergraduate and MBA levels, as well as to engineering, science and medical graduate students and post-docs across UVM.
