From Heidi Neck, one of the most influential thinkers in entrepreneurship education today, Chris Neck, an award-winning professor, and Emma Murray, business consultant and author, comes this ground-breaking new text.
Entrepreneurship: The Practice and Mindset catapults students beyond the classroom by helping them develop an entrepreneurial mindset so they can create opportunities and take action in uncertain environments. Based on the world-renowned Babson Entrepreneurship program, this new text emphasizes practice and learning through action. Students learn entrepreneurship by taking small actions and interacting with stakeholders in order to get feedback, experiment, and move ideas forward. Students walk away from this text with the entrepreneurial mindset, skillset, and toolset that can be applied to startups as well as organizations of all kinds. Whether your students have backgrounds in business, liberal arts, engineering, or the sciences, this text will take them on a transformative journey.
Heidi Neck, PhD, is a Babson College professor and the Jeffry A. Timmons Professor of Entrepreneurial
Studies. She is the academic director of the Babson Academy, a dedicated unit within
Babson that inspires change in the way universities, specifically their faculty and students, teach
and learn entrepreneurship. The Babson Academy builds on Neck's work starting the Babson Collaborative,
a global institutional membership organization for colleges and universities seeking to
increase their capability and capacity in entrepreneurship education, and leading Babson's Symposia
for Entrepreneurship Educators (SEE), programs designed to further develop faculty from
around the world in the art and craft of teaching entrepreneurship and building entrepreneurship
programs. Neck has directly trained more than 3,000 faculty around the world in the art and craft
of teaching entrepreneurship.
She has taught entrepreneurship at the undergraduate, MBA, and executive levels. Neck is a
past president of the United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE),
an academic organization dedicated to the advancement of entrepreneurship education. Her
research interests include entrepreneurship education, the entrepreneurial mindset, and entrepreneurship
inside organizations. An award-winning educator and author, her textbook Entrepreneurship:
The Practice and Mindset (2017) was awarded Breakthrough Book of 2017 by SAGE and the
2018 Most Promising New Textbook award by the Textbook & Academic Authors Association.
Neck is the lead author of Teaching Entrepreneurship: A Practice-Based Approach (Elgar), a book written
to help educators teach entrepreneurship in more experiential and engaging ways. Additionally,
she has published 45+ book chapters, research monographs, and refereed articles.
Neck has been recognized for teaching excellence at Babson for undergraduate, graduate, and
executive education. She has also been recognized by international organizations the Academy of
Management and USASBE for excellence in pedagogy and course design. For pushing the frontiers
of entrepreneurship education in higher education, The Schulze Foundation and the Entrepreneur
and Innovation Exchange awarded her Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year in 2016.
Dr. Christopher P. Neck is currently an Associate Professor of Management at Arizona State University, where he held the title "University Master Teacher." From 1994 to 2009, he was part of the Pamplin College of Business faculty at Virginia Tech. He received his PhD in Management from Arizona State University and his MBA from Louisiana State University. Neck is author of the books
Self-Leadership: The Definitive Guide to Personal Excellence (2016, Sage);
Fit To Lead: The Proven 8-week Solution for Shaping Up Your Body, Your Mind, and Your Career (2004, St. Martin's Press; 2012, Carpenter's Sons Publishing);
Mastering Self-Leadership: Empowering Yourself for Personal Excellence, 6th edition (2013, Pearson);
The Wisdom of Solomon at Work (2001, Berrett-Koehler);
For Team Members Only: Making Your Workplace Team Productive and Hassle-Free (1997, Amacom Books); and
Medicine for the Mind: Healing Words to Help You Soar, 4th Edition (Wiley, 2012). Neck is also the coauthor of the principles of management textbook,
Management: A Balanced Approach to the 21st Century (Wiley 2013; 2017, 2nd Edition); the upcoming introductory to entrepreneurship textbook,
Entrepreneurship, (Sage, 2017); and the introductory to organizational behavior textbook,
Organizational Behavior (Sage, 2016).
Dr. Neck's research specialties include employee/executive fitness, self-leadership, leadership, group decision-making processes, and self-managing teams. He has over 100 publications in the form of books, chapters, and articles in various journals. Some of the outlets in which Neck's work has appeared include
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, The Journal of Organizational Behavior, The Academy of Management Executive, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, The Journal of Managerial Psychology, Executive Excellence, Human Relations, Human Resource Development Quarterly, Journal of Leadership Studies, Educational Leadership, and
The Commercial Law Journal.
Due to Neck's expertise in management, he has been cited in numerous national publications, including
The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Houston Chronicle, and the
Chicago Tribune. Additionally, each semester Neck teaches an introductory management course to a single class of anywhere from 500 to 1,000 students.
Dr. Neck was the recipient of the 2007 Business Week Favorite Professor Award." He is featured on www.businessweek.com as one of the approximately twenty professors from across the world receiving this award.
Neck currently teaches a mega section of Management Principles to approximately 500 students at Arizona State University. Neck received the Order of Omega Outstanding Teaching Award for 2012. This award is awarded to one professor at Arizona State by the Alpha Lamda Chapter of this leadership fraternity. His class sizes at Virginia Tech filled rooms up to 2,500 students. He received numerous teaching awards during his tenure at Virginia Tech, including the 2002 Wine Award for Teaching Excellence. Also, Neck was the ten-time winner (1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009) of the "Students' Choice Teacher of The Year Award" (voted by the students for the best teacher of the year within the entire university). Also, some of the organizations that have participated in Neck's management development training include GE/Toshiba, Busch Gardens, Clark Construction, the United States Army, Crestar, American Family Insurance, Sales and Marketing Executives International, American Airlines, American Electric Power, W. L. Gore & Associates, Dillard's Department Stores, and Prudential Life Insurance. Neck is also an avid runner. He has completed 12 marathons, including the Boston Marathon, the New York City Marathon, and the San Diego Marathon. In fact, his personal record for a single long distance run is a 40-mile run.
Emma L. Murray completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Spanish at University College Dublin (UCD) in County Dublin, Ireland. This was followed by a Higher Diploma (Hdip) in business studies and information technology at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business in County Dublin, Ireland. Following her studies, Emma spent nearly a decade in investment banking before becoming a full-time writer and author.
As a writer, Emma has worked on numerous texts, including business and economics, self-help, and psychology. Within the field of higher education, Emma worked with Dr. Christopher P. Neck and Dr. Jeffery D. Houghton on
Management (Wiley 2013); and is the coauthor of the principles of management textbook
Management: A Balanced Approach to the 21st Century (Wiley 2013, 2017-2nd Edition) and the coauthor of
Organizational Behavior (Sage 2017).
She is the author of
The Unauthorized Guide to Doing Business the Alan Sugar Way (2010, Wiley-Capstone); and the lead author of
How to Succeed as a Freelancer in Publishing (2010, How To Books). She lives in London.
