Austin Brown

Biography

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS

• D.  – Entrepreneurship, Baylor University (2022)
• S.  – Interdisciplinary Studies, Western Carolina University (2016)

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

• Brown, A. R., Wood, M. S., & Scheaf, D. J. (2022). Discovery Sells, But Who’s Buying? An Empirical Investigation of Entrepreneurs’ Technology License Decisions. Journal of Business Research. 144. 403-415.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Brown’s research is rooted in the insights of organization theory, which he uses to unpack the influence of context on entrepreneurs’ cognitive processes. His dissertation explores how the new venture ideation process transforms under distinct configurations of the entrepreneur’s surrounding ecosystem. Some of his previously published work investigates how decision context shapes entrepreneurs’ opportunity assessments, such as in the setting of university technology license decisions.

Dr. Brown’s teaching experience is predominantly in foundations of entrepreneurship courses, which he designs as semester-long hands-on boot camp for generating and evaluating new venture ideas. In addition, he has taught senior capstone courses in strategic management and first-year courses in theories of knowledge.

Prior to starting his Ph.D., he worked in the wine industry—both in North Carolina and Burgundy, France—with a primary focus on viticulture. However, at 22, he found himself missing his experience tutoring courses in Micro and Macro Economics and Organic Chemistry I and II, which led him to decide a life of grape farming wasn’t for him. This led him to take on a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellowship at Western Carolina University’s Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, where continued working as a Teaching Assistant for Microeconomics and Ethics of Capitalism during the first two years of his Ph.D.

In his spare time, Dr. Brown enjoys fishing, hiking, and camping in the areas around Nashville, as well as playing games such as Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, and Old School Runescape. When none of that is going on, you can usually find he, his wife Paige, and their cat Appa hanging out in their home in East Nashville (likely watching Survivor).