Timothy Folta

Fellowship 2012

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Timothy B. Folta is the Thomas John and Bette Wolff Family Chair of Strategic Entrepreneurship at University of Connecticut. Prior to this appointment he held the Brock Family Chair of Strategic Management at Purdue University. His research and teaching examine both entrepreneurship and corporate strategy, analyzing how uncertainty constrains behavior, and how managers and entrepreneurs use organizational design and scope decisions to cope with uncertainty.

His research has garnered a number of awards, including the 2012 IDEA Foundational Paper Award by the Entrepreneurship Division at the Academy of Management honoring a paper that has powerfully and positively changed the conversation in the field of entrepreneurship for at least a decade; the 2009 Fulbright Special Senior Scholar Award for the 60th anniversary of the Fulbright program in Italy; the 2006 Office of Advocacy, U.S. Small Business Administration Award for the best conference paper exploring the importance of small business to the U.S. economy or a public policy issue of importance to the entrepreneurial community; and appeared in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Management Science, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. He is Associate Editor of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and on the editorial boards of Journal of Business Venturing and Strategic Management Journal.

Professor Folta is Founding Director of BIOMEDSHIP, a partnership with Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and Indiana University’s School of Medicine to train graduate students around “BIOMEDical entrepreneurSHIP”.

Watch Tim's TEDx Purdue talk on "Myths in Entrepreneurship":

Corporate Strategy and Value Creation Through Resource Redeployability

This project formally develop and empirically test an emergent theory explaining how firms create value through diversification. Existing literature explains that diversification creates value by improving efficiency because firms can simultaneously share resources across multiple businesses. Our emerging theory explains a second benefit to diversification – firms gain flexibility to withdraw resources from declining businesses and redeploy them to growing ones.

Resource redeployment seems to be a common strategy, yet, there exists no research demonstrating how much firm value is attributable to having the flexibility to redeploy resources. Theoretical understanding of resource redeployability is in its nascent stage, and empirical confirmation is absent. Moreover, since existing research ascribes all diversification benefits to the first explanation, there are risks that it ascribes spurious support for the first explanation and leads to inaccurate advice to managers. The project will include an international conference in Strasbourg on the topic of corporate resource redeployability, inviting top scholars on the subject from around the world, and will result in original research papers and possibly a special issue or book.