Tim Weiss is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at the Imperial College London. His research programme sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship and society, analysing the changing nature of entrepreneurship and its social effects.
Assistant Professor Tim Weiss
Department of Management, Imperial College London
Tim is interested in the field and organizational level of analysis, studying phenomena like the emergence of Kenya’s Silicon Savannah, racial inequality in venture performance outcomes, misconduct in and by startups, and experimentation on platform organizations. He has conducted extensive qualitative and ethnographic work, leveraging sociological and anthropological constructs for theorization. Tim is a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Network for Technology and Entrepreneurship Research in African Societies (learn more by listening to this podcast episode) and of the annual Entrepreneurship & Society conference.
Tim’s most recent and ongoing empirical work focuses on entrepreneurial crime. Together with colleagues, he is building a novel database on U.S. entrepreneurial crime cases to better understand the unique vulnerabilities of ventures to misconduct and the impact of misconduct detection on venture performance. He also studies entrepreneurship in extreme poverty contexts and has collected data from an informal vehicle repair cluster in Nairobi, Kenya, through geo-spatial, interview and ethnographic data.
Tim is the editor of the hugely successful open-access book Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making (Palgrave, 2017) which ranked among the top 5 most downloaded open access publications at Palgrave Macmillan. Before joining the faculty at Imperial College, Tim was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Work, Technology & Organization in Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering Department. He holds a Doctorate and Master’s degree from a start-up academic institution, Zeppelin University in Germany, and a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from the University of Vienna.
Before becoming an academic researcher, Tim worked in international development aid in Kenya and Ethiopia. Outside work, he enjoys spending time with his wife and young son as well as cycling, meditation, and boxing. You can learn more about Tim’s work by listening to this podcast episode.