Dr. Sharon Alvarez, Thomas W. Olofson Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies, University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Alvarez’s work explores the possibility that opportunities are created and exploited by those seeking to generate economic profits. This simple observation that entrepreneurs have agency and create new knowledge and are not just reactors in a given world has a number of important implications for both the field of entrepreneurship and, more broadly, the field of management. As a consequence of this work, the standard view in entrepreneurship shifted towards a view of opportunities being endogenously created by the actions of individuals seeking to create value under conditions of Knightian uncertainty.

This work on opportunities and Knightian uncertainty has implications for the field of management that has broadly adopted the paradigm of bounded rationality. Alvarez’s latest publication (with Porac), “Imagination, Indeterminacy, and Managerial Choice at the Limit of Knowledge,” recognizes that, as an economic process unfolds, the future is often significantly different from the past, and the past is not completely reliable in predicting the future. Putting managerial choice and cognition at the center of decision-making instead of viewing managers as cognitively limited reactors to the environment, this paper challenges the current management paradigm based on the Carnegie School’s bounded rationality. Elected to the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management in 2020, Professor Alvarez is currently Vice President Elect and Program Chair and will serve as President in 2023; she is Past Chair of the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management and was the 2015 Denver Program Chair for the Strategic Management Society as well as Representative at Large for the SMS Entrepreneurship Interest Group.

She is associate editor for the Academy of Management Review and past associate editor for Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. Her work has been published in a multitude of journals and outlets, including Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Academy of Management Perspectives, Academy of Management Executive, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management, and Human Resource Management Journal.