About Sharon Alvarez

Dr. Sharon Alvarez is the Thomas W. Olofson Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh.

She previously served as the Walter Koch Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Daniels College of Business, University of Denver, and, prior to that Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management and the Academic Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the Max M. Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University.

A Max Planck Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Entrepreneurship and Economic Systems Research, Alvarez has been a visiting professor at Sun-Yet-Sen University in China, the University of Alberta, and the University of Utah. Her current research includes entrepreneurship theory of opportunities, firm, and market emergence.

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.

The recipient of numerous awards for excellence in research and teaching, Professor Alvarez’s paper (with Barney) “Discovery and Creation: Alternative Theories of Entrepreneurial Action” won the Academy of Management’s Entrepreneurship Division 2019 Foundational Paper Award as well as the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal Best Paper Award; her paper (with Barney) “Forming and Exploiting Opportunities: The Implications of Discovery and Creation Processes for Entrepreneurial and Organizational Research” was the runner-up for the INFORMS award; and her paper (with Barney) “How Entrepreneurs Organize under Conditions of Uncertainty” won the Journal of Management Best Paper Award. Her work in the Journal of Management is the 27th most cited article in the last 50 years; she has currently close to 13,000 citations overall. To this day, the paper “Discovery and Creation: Alternative Theories of Entrepreneurial Action” is the most cited paper in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.