Olav Sorenson is currently the Joseph Jacobs Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies, Professor of Strategy and of Sociology, and Faculty Director of the Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. In addition to mentoring student startup teams, he teaches electives on venture capital strategy and on entrepreneurial venture initiation.
His primary stream of research pertains to economic geography, focusing on how entrepreneurship influences the growth and competitiveness of regions within countries and on why some regions appear more supportive to entrepreneurs than others. He has called attention to some of the unexpected consequences of the fact that social capital plays an important role in entrepreneurial success. Largely in recognition for this research, Professor Sorenson received the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.
His secondary streams of research have been on the relationships between basic science and innovation and on how organizations can better learn from their interactions with customers and from their manufacturing experience. In total, he has delivered more than 400 research presentations and has had more than 100 papers published on these subjects, in journals such as Science, the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, the Strategic Management Journal, and Research Policy.
Prior to returning to UCLA, Olav Sorenson held the Frederick Frank ’54 and Mary C. Tanner Professorship at the Yale School of Management and, before that, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair in Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto. He has also served on the faculties of London Business School and the University of Chicago, and has held visiting appointments at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, SDA Bocconi, Universidad Carlos III, Melbourne Business School, Singapore Management University, the National University of Singapore, BI Norwegian Business School, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, INSEAD, and the Stockholm School of Economics.
Olav Sorenson grew up in South Dakota and received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has also received an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University.