Profile

Alan Meyer studies industry emergence, corporate venturing, and technology entrepreneurship using organizational theory and sociology as theoretical frames. He is a field researcher who triangulates between archival data and primary data gathered through interviews and naturalistic observation. His early research explored the health care sector, with a focus on hospitals' responses to 'environmental jolts'—unexpected shocks that created natural experiments in organizational change.

Nanotechnology and venture capital are recent research contexts, where the National Science Foundation has supported his work on corporations' adoption of venture capitalists' investment practices, and the emergence of a network of scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors seeking to commercialize nanotechnology. Meyer has been awarded grants totaling more than $2.1M by the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Health Services Research, the U.S. Army Research Institute, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute, and the Australian Research Council.

Meyer cofounded the Lundquist Center for Entrepreuership's Technology Entrepreneurship Program, an interdisciplinary program that enables graduate students in business, law, and the sciences to work in multi-disciplinary teams to pursue the commercialization of leading-edge technologies invented by scientists at UO, OSU, OHSU, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He currently facilitates Academy of Management sponsored bootcamp-style workshops that mentor young African management scholars in Ghana, Rwanda, and South Africa.

Meyer has served as associate editor in chief for Organization Science; as associate editor for Academy of Management Journal; and on the editorial boards of Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and Academy of Management Journal. He has co-edited special issues of Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and Academy of Management Journal.