A Fulbright Partnership with Jeffrey Reuer and Sprott’s Frank Jiang

Jeffrey Reuer is the Guggenheim Endowed Chair and Professor of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Operations at the Leeds School of Business (University of Colorado Boulder). He was the Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair at the Sprott School of Business throughout the 2020-2021 academic year. During his time as a Fulbright Chair, Jeffrey worked closely with Frank Jiang, Associate Professor of International Business at Sprott. We sat down with Jeffrey and Frank to hear more about their partnership and their research together.

How did the Fulbright journey begin and how did you start this partnership?

Jeffrey: I was contacted by Fulbright and asked if I’d be interested in applying. I hadn’t really thought about it before but I talked to Frank early in the process, well before I was given the award. Frank and I had some close, overlapping areas of interest and it was a natural fit. With COVID, there was so much uncertainty and the start date was delayed quite a bit. One of the benefits is that we decided that we were going to do this regardless and we just started immediately. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked out or we wouldn’t have gotten a couple of projects out of it, I don’t think. It was really about the collaboration with Frank and the ideas that we were pursuing together that got me the most excited.

Frank: To me it was a stroke of luck that Fulbright reached out to Jeffrey and created such a platform for me to work with him. When I realized that Jeffrey was going to join Sprott as a Fulbright Chair, I immediately saw the opportunity as I was looking for experienced scholars like Jeffrey to provide some guidance on a couple of ideas that I had at that point. Obviously, having the opportunity to work with Jeffrey was such a boost to the project and to my confidence in completing the project. Knowing that I can get that expertise and input from Jeffrey was invaluable and we just went from there.

Can you talk about the research projects you’ve been working on together?

Frank: The main project is about how a firm’s initial public offering (IPO) can shape their internationalization process. That project draws on Jeffrey’s expertise in IPOs and also his experience in international business. I have also worked in this space of international business for many years and it’s a very natural partnership that truly gives us the opportunity to combine our expertise and interests. This project has now resulted in an article, “The impact of initial public offerings on SMEs’ foreign investment decisions” in the Journal of International Business Studies which is a well-respected journal so we were very happy with this outcome.

Jeffrey: What’s kind of fun about the project is looking at how IPOs affect firms’ internationalization activities. Especially small and medium-sized firms. And it really brings together corporate strategy, finance, international business and entrepreneurship. One of the things that I was excited about early on is that a lot of the IPO studies look at firms that go public and then they track them over time. And one of the things that was special about some data that Frank had was he actually had information on firms that did not go public so we could compare them in a way that many studies couldn’t and we used some statistical techniques to do that but it’s a neat advance in that respect. We have another project as well that’s at an earlier stage of development where we looked at the international expansion of firms and how they engage with the financial community in terms of the analysts. So that emerged out of this too.

Looking back at the Fulbright experience, what are some of the key takeaways?

Jeffrey:

Frank is more well-schooled and up to date on streams of work in international business and that was really important to me and seeing these new connections with internationalization and IPOs. All these fields have become so super specialized so sometimes having a partner to join those two things is super critical.

Frank: This project gave me the opportunity to gain familiarity with certain fields (such as finance and IPO) and in a sense made me believe that as long as I can invest myself into specific fields, I can actually accomplish a lot even though I’m relatively new to those areas. We can generate some good results despite the fact that I might be personally less familiar with one area or the other. Having a partner like Jeffrey really gives you the urge to take risks to go beyond your comfort zone to try something that as Jeffrey said, can help to connect different ideas, to explore new ideas and to take a little bit more risk in my own research.