ProfessorJeffery McMullen

Jeffery S. McMullen, PhD, MBA, CPA, is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at Imperial Business School, best known for his thought leadership in developing much of the field's current theoretical foundation and for setting its research trajectory over the last decade as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Business Venturing, the world's leading academic journal dedicated to entrepreneurship. He joined Imperial Business School in 2025 after 17 years at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, where he was the David H. Jacobs Chair in Strategic Entrepreneurship. He is currently the consulting editor for the Journal of Business Venturing, a board member of numerous academic journals, a Representative at Large for the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, and the former Editor-in-Chief of Business Horizons, a top practitioner-oriented journal dedicated to the study of business.    

Taking a polymathic approach to entrepreneurship scholarship, Jeff draws on concepts and methods from the social sciences, humanities, and physical sciences to research the nature, causes, and consequences of entrepreneurial action. For each of the last six years, a Stanford University survey has ranked him among the top 2% of the world’s scientists in terms of research impact. He has published over 100 articles, best paper proceedings, and book chapters that have garnered over 25,000 citations according to Google Scholar, and have received numerous awards, including the Academy of Management’s Best Conceptual Paper Award (2002, 2024) and its prestigious, Foundational Paper Award (2018), which honours "a paper that has powerfully and positively changed the conversation in the field of entrepreneurship for at least a decade."

Jeff is also a celebrated educator, mentor, and leader. He is regularly invited to keynote conferences, consult, and speak at professional development workshops worldwide. He has taught strategy, entrepreneurship, and behavioural research methods, receiving teaching awards for pedagogy and innovative course design at the undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral levels. In 2007, he was awarded the Academy of Management's Innovation in Pedagogy Award for his pioneering work in social entrepreneurship at Baylor University. In 2008, Jeff won Indiana University's Trustees Teaching Award for his course on design thinking. In 2009, he was the first to receive a sustainability grant from IU for his course on sustainable business at the Kelley School of Business. In 2012, he received Indiana University's Trustee Teaching Award for excellence in MBA teaching. In 2013, he was awarded the Sauvain Award (a lifetime achievement award for excellence in undergraduate teaching) and was again nominated for a Trustees Award for his doctoral seminar on behavioural research methods. In 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2024, he was nominated and awarded best seminar and best advisor by the doctoral students of the Kelley School of Business. In 2022, he received the prestigious Mentor Award from the Academy of Management, and, in 2023, Jeff received the Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award from the Academy of Management for his outstanding service contributions to the field.

Prior to academia, Jeff worked as a CPA for KPMG's Information, Communication, and Entertainment division in Denver and as an entrepreneur in the Boulder Valley, consulting and starting new ventures, including a successful sustainable venture he sold to Dole Pineapple of Hawaii in 2004. 

Finally, Jeff is a loving husband of his beautiful wife of 30 years, a proud father of two amazing daughters, a bibliophile and voracious reader (of fiction and non-fiction), a fan of redemption movies and melancholy music, an enthusiastic traveler, a delinquent musician, a gifted designer and carpenter, a mindless doodler, a lapse theologian, a forgetful historian, a recovering marathoner, an erratic golfer, and an afficionado of comedy who lives for those moments “when you can’t breathe for laughing so hard" after a humorous riff.