Professor Becky Reuber

Professor Reuber is currently ASRF Visiting Senior Research Fellow (April-June 2012), working with Dr. Anna Morgan Thomas in the Business School. Her research, during her stay, will focus on advancing understanding of internet-enabled international entrepreneurship. Prof Reuber is also involved in a number of events to take place during her visit, aimed at stimulating wider sharing of ideas and approaches to research with others in the College of Social Sciences.

Becky Reuber is Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (see http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/reuber).  She is the author of dozens of scholarly papers.  Her research has won awards from the Academy of Management, the International Council for Small Business, the Canadian Council of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, and the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada.  She sits on the editorial board of Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, and is Associate Editor of Family Business Review.

Dr. Reuber contributes to policy discussions in the entrepreneurship area.  Three of her recent reports are Building International Sales in a Digitized Economy and Survival of the Fittest: Which SMEs Internationalize Most Extensively and Effectively? published in 2011 and 2008, respectively, by the Conference Board of Canada, and The State of Entrepreneurship in Canada, published in 2010 by Industry Canada.

Dr. Reuber’s research is focused on young and small firms, in the following ways:

1. Reputation in young firms.  Some firms enjoy a good reputation at start-up due to their founders’ track record or their affiliations with high status early trading partners; however, many do not.  Even with these advantages, there are likely to be negative signals about new firms during their early years, when a lack of market and technological experience often results in tactical and strategic errors.  The objective of this line of research is to understand how young firms can signal their reputation effectively. 
2. International new ventures.  Traditional international business theory assumes that firms begin to enter foreign markets as they become more established and larger.  However, doing business in foreign markets early is essential for many Canadian firms:  because of the small domestic size in many sectors, firms require double or triple the export intensity of their U.S.-based counterparts in order to survive.  The objective of this line of research is to understand the factors that enable early-stage firms to overcome the limitations of their resources and capabilities, and to internationalize successfully.
3. Social media use by entrepreneurs. Social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are increasingly being used by entrepreneurs and the objective of this line of research is to understand the implications of this adoption.

Becky is an active supporter of entrepreneurial firms in Canada.  She consults to public- and private-sector organizations, and has helped pick entrepreneurial award winners for a variety of organizations including Cisco Systems, the Canadian Women Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the Organization of Women in International Trade.  She has been a member of the Toronto Board of Trade’s Access to Capital Task Force, and is a past Vice-President (Programs) of the Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship.  She is a frequent commentator in the media and was a member of the Business Advisory Panel of the ReportOnBusiness.com website for the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.   For the past two years she has written a monthly case study on interesting entrepreneurial firms for that website.  The two most recent ones are about Locationary and Buyosphere.