Resources on Entrepreneurship

Defining entrepreneurship

An assortment of interesting articles, including broad overviews of contemporary understandings of entrepreneurship, the history thereof, within specific communities, etc.

• “What is entrepreneurship?” (Stanford Online)
• “Reconstructing Vancouver’s black community from the history of invisibility : analysis of the role of black entrepreneurship in British Columbia, Canada” (Majda Mohamed, UBC MA thesis, 2023)
• “Eras of digital entrepreneurship: connecting the past, present, and future” (Ch. 3 in Handbook of Digital Entrepreneurship, 2023)
• “Old Concepts Making New History: Refugee Self-reliance, Livelihoods and the ‘Refugee Entrepreneur’” (Skran and Easton-Calabria, Journal of Refugee Studies, 2020)
• “The history of entrepreneurship: Medieval origins of a modern phenomenon” (Casson and Casson, Business History, 2014)
• “The State of Entrepreneurship in Canada” (Government of Canada, 2010)

Entrepreneurship and grad students

Read about the surprising resonances between graduate studies and entrepreneurship.

• “Find Your Inner Entrepreneur” (Erica Machulak, Inside Higher Ed, 2021)
• “The PhD Entrepreneur” (Letitia Henville, Inside Higher Ed, 2023)
• “Arts & Humanities offers entrepreneurship for all: Umair Khan” (UC Berkeley, 2023)
• “Humanities = Jobs: The Tactics of Contrarian Entrepreneurial Humanists” (Durand and McAllister, ADE Bulletin 2022)
• The Entrepreneurial Humanities: The Crucial Role of the Humanities in Enterprise and the Economy (Routledge, 2023)
• Arts & Humanities Entrepreneurship Hub

Critical conversations on entrepreneurship

As graduate students in the Arts, participants in our Entrepreneurship for Arts Graduate Students workshops are sometimes skeptical of entrepreneurship, and may have concerns about adopting exploitative or unsustainable practices in their work lives. Bringing entrepreneurship into graduate studies in the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts doesn’t have to mean reducing critical inquiry to an instrument of capitalism or turning scholarship into a cog in the machine of industry.

• Listen to Winter 2021 Amplify Your Product or Service participants Matthew Smithdeal and Lily Ivanova speaking with UBC Professor Joel Bakan about the problems of neoliberal approaches to university research and academic work on YouTube (Dec. 2021).
• “Entrepreneurship – A Powerful Tool for Decolonization” (Shumaila Y. Yousafzai, et. al., Elsevier SSRN, 2023)
• “Informing Canadian Innovation Policy Through a Decolonizing Lens on Indigenous Entrepreneurship and Innovation” (Merli Tamtik, Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 2021)