Brock University’s Distinguished Professor designation is a lifetime appointment recognizing outstanding achievement in each recipient’s academic discipline. This is the fifth in a series of articles highlighting this year’s recipients. Read more about the award and its recipients on The Brock News.

Distinguished Professor Dirk De Clercq has spent his entire academic career advancing the understanding of entrepreneurship.

The Goodman School of Business Professor of Management has recently received Brock’s new Distinguished Professor designation in recognition of his contributions and achievements.

“I feel honoured to receive this designation and I want to express my gratitude to the University, as well as the many colleagues I’ve worked with both within Goodman and outside of Brock, for the support over the years,” he said.

De Clercq’s research has focused on people who start and run their own businesses, as well as entrepreneurial behaviours in general, with the goal of creating a better understanding of how organizations and governments can empower people to change and improve their work and life situation.

“Entrepreneurship demands developing and implementing new ideas, whether by employees, existing organizations or through new business creation,” he said. “Understanding the challenges and opportunities that entrepreneurial actors confront is important for companies’, countries’, and society’s economic growth and prosperity.”

An overarching objective of De Clercq‘s interdisciplinary research is to generate critical insights into the distinct hurdles and benefits linked to change-invoking entrepreneurial activities in Canada and abroad, covering a large range of entrepreneurial phenomena at the individual, firm and macro, or institutional, levels.

At the individual level, he has investigated entrepreneurial work behaviours, including employees’ creativity, idea championing and voice behaviour.

Some of his recent research has focused on how broader events like the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted employees’ entrepreneurship. He found that the hardships that come with external crisis situations can undermine the energy needed to be entrepreneurial, but access to valuable resources such as resilience and peer support can counterbalance this harmful effect.

At the firm level, his work has examined a range of outcomes relevant to entrepreneurship, including the international performance of early-stage ventures, technology commercialization and sustainable behaviour. A notable focus in this work is the specific challenges confronting entrepreneurial firms led by women, immigrants or others who might be relatively disadvantaged, as well as the resources that these firms can leverage to address the challenges.

At the macro level, De Clercq’s studies have looked at the impact of broader institutional environments where entrepreneurial behaviours take place. He has found that opportunity structures, social network characteristics, government regulations and cultural values impact outcome variables such as startup rates, growth-oriented entrepreneurship and country-level innovation.

A prolific researcher, De Clercq has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles in journals that span the fields of entrepreneurship, innovation management, organizational behaviour, human resource management and business ethics.

The scope of his research is truly global, consisting of numerous single-country or dual-country studies covering five continents and more than 30 countries along with various multi-country studies that compare relevant entrepreneurial phenomena across nations.

He is also included on Stanford University’s list of the world’s top two per cent of scientists, both in terms of citations over the course of a career and for the most citations in 2022.

In addition to receiving several research awards, including Brock’s Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity, De Clercq has also been recognized for his teaching excellence receiving Goodman’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2023. He’s known for his ability to integrate his substantial research into his teaching activities and offer students valuable opportunities to apply academic knowledge to practical settings at both the undergraduate and graduate level.