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Caroline Wigren-Kristoferson
My name is Caroline Wigren-Kristoferson and I have a position as Assistant Professor at CIRCLE. My disciplinary background is Business Administration with a focus on entrepreneurship. I defended my dissertation The Spirit of Gnojsö – The grand narrative and beyond at Jönköping International Business School, spring 2003. The dissertation was based on a one-year ethnographic study in the industrial district of Gnosjö, and was written as a monograph.
I partly left Jönköping International Business Scholl in spring 2007, when I started to work as an associate professor at Malmö University. In spring 2008 I started my four year employment as a research assistant at CIRCLE, Lund University. From March 2010 until December 2010 I have been on maternity leave.
Research
Most of my time is devoted to various research projects. Most of the projects I have been involved in are empirically driven. The great majority of them are dealing with issues that are of relevance for policy makers. From a more theoretical point of view the projects are dealing with institutions, formal as well as informal institutions. And, in almost all projects the context is taken into account, i.e. entrepreneurship is contextualized – which I consider to be of great importance.
I have a genuine interest for methodological questions. The ethnographic method, applied in the dissertation was interesting and challenging. During the last years my interest for the quantitative method has increased. My opinion is that the research question, what I want to explain or understand, should guide the choice of method. I very much appreciate the interaction with people outside academia, as I think it is of great value that research is communicated to a broader audience. I as a researcher also get a lot of input from interacting with practitioners, entrepreneurs, civil servants as well as policy makers. I actually see it as my responsibility to engage in third stream activities of different kinds. A lot of my research is done in collaboration with external actors.
My ongoing research projects and research interests can be related to the following topical areas:
Academic Entrepreneurship
Since 2004 I have worked with different research projects focusing on academic entrepreneurship. During my time at CIRCLE my interest for academic entrepreneurship has increased. Together with Dr. Fumi Kitagawa (now at Bristol University) I conducted a study about Academic Entrepreneurship in strong research environments. We studied the Linnaeus environments at Lund University (strong research environments that have received long-term funding from the Swedish research council). The study was financed by Vinnnova, who had a pilot project to learn about commercialization processes from basic research. What I find most interesting about academic entrepreneurship is the driving forces behind engagement in academic entrepreneurship. In the future I hope to be able to study norms and values in different academic environments to try to understand why academic entrepreneurship is visible and possible in certain environments and not in others.
Entrepreneurship – contexts and institutions
In 2008 I became involved in a project initiated and launched by Region Skåne about entrepreneurship in the health and care sectors. Those sectors are of great interest to study from an entrepreneurship perspective as the markets have opened up for private actors to deliver publicly financed health care services. As health and care sectors are dominated by females, and are female-labelled sectors it is interesting to follow and see if more women will start businesses when it is possible and if so, their driving forces for doing it – or not doing it.
Since 2009 I have had an interest in social and societal entrepreneurship, the starting point was my involvement in the think- and do-tank SMEDJAN (The smithy). The Smithy was initiated by two Swedish governmental bodies and a public-private sector partnership. The main issue for the Smithy was to investigate how municipalities could support societal entrepreneurs, and eventually identify impediments to increased societal entrepreneurship on municipality level. Together with PhD Karin Berglund, Stockholm University I participated in the Smithy and followed the process from a research perspective.
I have an ongoing research project together with Professor Bengt Johannisson about extreme entrepreneurs. We define an extreme entrepreneur as a person who has contributed to the development of new institutions, or who has changed existing institutions.
A research interest under development is rural entrepreneurship. What I find fascinating about rural entrepreneurship is that the entrepreneurs tend to have access to the resources and they tend to organize their lives to make it possible to live and run their firm on the countryside – a kind of life style entrepreneurship.
Recent publications
- Wigren-Kristoferson, C., Kitagawa, F., and Gabrielsson, J. (2011). Mind the Gap and Bridge the Gap: Knowledge Production, Enterprise and Public Dissemination at Swedish 'Strong Research Environments', Science and Public Policy (SPP), 38(6): 481–492.
- Berglund, K. and Wigren, C. (forthcoming), Societal Entrepreneurship: The shaping of a different story of entrepreneurship, Tamara Journal of Critical Organization Inquiry.
- Karlsson, T. and Wigren, C. (forthcoming, published on-line 26 of May, 2010), Start-ups among university employees: The influence of legitimacy, human capital and social capital, Journal of Technology Transfer.
Last modified 9 Mar 2012