Professor Ted Baker has been selected to fill the new George F. Farris Chair in Entrepreneurship at Rutgers Business School, Newark and New Brunswick. The Rutgers University Board of Governors approved the creation of the endowed chair and the appointment of Professor Baker as the first holder of the chair.
Baker was the founding executive director of The Entrepreneurship Collaborative at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management in Raleigh, North Carolina. The collaborative, known as TEC, is a center of research, education as well as a service provider to the entrepreneurship community.
The George Farris Chair in Entrepreneurship is named after George Farris, who taught at Rutgers Business School for 31 years. He was also the founding director of the Technology Management Research Center.
The $3 million endowed faculty position is funded by a $1.5 million gift from the Celia Lipton Farris and Victor W. Farris Foundation, which is named after George Farris’s aunt and uncle. The foundation’s gift was matched by pledge from an anonymous donor.
The anonymous donor’s portion is part of a larger $27 million pledge made in 2011 as part of an “18 Chair Challenge” during the Our Rutgers, Our Future Campaign.
Baker’s research focuses on identifying the skills and behaviors that allow entrepreneurs to overcome the variety of resource constraints that are typical to startup businesses. The work has taken him across the U.S., to Europe and South Africa, where he is a senior fellow at the University of Cape Town’s Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship.