Management Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Ted Baker
“There is no end to what I can teach from my experience, because I, and the people I worked with, made so many mistakes in so many contexts that it’s easy for me to find ways to teach students to be better than we were.“
Ted Baker Associate Professor
From 1978 until 1993, I chose work situations almost entirely on the basis of what I thought I could learn about how organizations work.
This led me to management, leadership and entrepreneurial roles that ranged from starting companies, to inventing and introducing new products and services for large companies, to banging my head against the wall in frustration when we sold one startup to what was then the world’s largest automobile manufacturer. Across many markets and industries, the most important consistent theme of my work life has been using technology to create business growth. I began my academic career running an entrepreneurship program at UW-Madison in 1999 and have been at the NC State College of Management since 2005.
Over the years, I have been part of two successful startups. One of them (long after my departure) conducted one of only two of the IPOs generally considered successful the year after the bubble burst. The other was the fastest growing high technology startup in the U.S. in 1990. I also started a firm in 1994 (during graduate school) that served as a platform to enable me and some of my friends to sell what we knew from earlier high growth experience to some of the dotcoms that were trying to figure out how to be real companies. That was fun while it lasted. I also spent time as a banker and (separately) ran a small seed investment fund. I continue to sit on startup and growth company boards and to do some consulting work when I find companies that are interesting to me and that want some help.
My research focuses on finding the skills and patterns of behavior that allow entrepreneurs to overcome the wide variety of resource constraints that startups typically face. I am conducting this research in the U.S., Africa, Eastern Europe and (soon) India.
What I teach today is in fact directly grounded in the work I’ve done for my entire adult life, enhanced by having been examined against the research I have now studied and conducted. I teach students to use technology to create business growth, primarily in startup contexts, but using skills and behaviors that can be effective in established firms as well. There is no end to what I can teach from my experience, because I, and the people I worked with, made so many mistakes in so many contexts that it’s easy for me to find ways to teach students to be better than we were. I have very little technical training myself, but early on learned to be comfortable learning about new technology capabilities and working effectively with engineers and scientists.
I am particularly gratified that the structure of programs and the community at the College of Management and the university as a whole allow me to enact this lesson in cross-disciplinary classrooms every day.
