From Research to Me-Search

Dean Shepherd was halfway through his Ph.D in Entrepreneurship at Bond University’s School of Business in Australia when his father’s residential contracting business, JL Shepherd & Sons, went bankrupt.

“As a doctoral student at the time, I was teaching about how entrepreneurs learn from failure. They’re motivated, and they try again. But that’s not what I was seeing happening with my own dad,” the Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship remembered.

While it was too late to save his dad’s business, Shepherd felt morally compelled to dig deep into understanding entrepreneurial failure for future business leaders. Over the next 30 years, he became a leading academic voice on entrepreneurship as a response to adversity, the entrepreneurial mindset, the destructive side of entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial responses to natural disasters and conflict.

After teaching at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, Shepherd came to Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business in 2017 to build its entrepreneurship focus. He teaches the subject to MBA students in an introductory setting and in a new course, Decision Making Under Uncertainty.

In 2025, Shepherd’s longstanding commitment to the field was recognized with a Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. The prestigious award is sponsored by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum, innovation agency Vinnova and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. At a formal ceremony in Stockholm, he was honored with a cash award of 100,000 euros and a statuette inspired by “the hand of God,” which he now displays in his South Bend home beside his late father’s lawn bowls,  brightly colored wooden balls from the Australian version of bocce that his father loved dearly.   

Me-Search 

Shepherd is as prolific, widely known and respected in his niche as the novelist John Grisham is in commercial fiction or Ina Garten is in the culinary world. He’s authored more than 20 books and 180 articles, racking up more than 90,000 Google Scholar citations along the way.

When asked what inspires him most, Shepherd answered simply: “me-search.” It’s a term he officially coined in a chapter titled, “Me-Search for Generating Ideas for Entrepreneurial Thinking,” in his 2023 book co-authored with Holger Patzelt, “Entrepreneurial Theorizing: An Approach to Research.”

“Me-search” is what Shepherd calls the work of a scholar who lets their personal life experiences drive their research questions.

Shepherd is deeply curious. He’s always let his own questions lead the way. “For me, my me-search was my father’s business failure that set off a whole string of research in learning from failure and measuring the negative emotions behind that,” he said.

A first-generation college student, Shepherd yearned for academic role models to offer advice as he shaped his career. He describes himself as an average student who pursued an MBA at Bond University, not out of passion or talent, but because he didn’t know what else to do after graduating from college.

But then, a class in entrepreneurship theory sparked his interest to the point that it was all he could think about. His path became clear. Shepherd stayed on for a Ph.D. because research on the subject “was all I wanted to do and keep doing for as long as I could.”

Now, a mentor himself, he said, “I always try to remember how hard graduate school felt while I was in it,” and takes his students under his wing, just as others did for him. He’s stayed at Mendoza because the work is meaningful, but also because his students and colleagues demonstrate the College’s mission, Grow the Good in Business, in their actions and attitudes.

“It really is part of the culture at Mendoza and draws in students,” Shepherd said. “When you teach about doing business to do good in the world, they just automatically buy into it, whether it’s the idea of social entrepreneurship, helping the environment or helping disadvantaged people.”  

Non-WEIRD Entrepreneurship Research 

Shepherd’s research fits right in with Mendoza’s mission of preparing business leaders to make a difference. He begins by offering his students the opportunity to co-author research papers in the field.

The standard American view of entrepreneurship romanticizes founders such as Jeff Bezos launching Amazon from his Bellevue, Washington, garage and building the monopoly that it is today — a phenomenon that Shepherd refers to as “just the tip of the entrepreneurial iceberg.”

In contrast, his own academic canon focuses almost exclusively on entrepreneurs in non-Western countries who start businesses out of necessity, such as ragpickers operating informal recycling businesses out of India’s slums, resourceful Haitians who forged businesses to help people in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake, and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon given little choice but to run illegal businesses to make ends meet for their families.

“If we start studying everyday entrepreneurs, then we’re talking about the billions of people around the world who work to feed their families and educate their children. We’re studying the tip of the iceberg because that’s where we are standing, but it’s all this stuff under the water that we should really be researching,” Shepherd explained.

For example, in a 2025 journal article published in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, “What if we are the WEIRD Ones,” Shepherd and co-authors Sarah Chase of Notre Dame and Joakim Wincent of the University of St. Gallen identified how leading entrepreneurial theories are dominated by WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) samples.

These samples were tested largely on WEIRD audiences, which may not apply to non-WEIRD contexts. According to the team’s literature review, more than 93% of the first authors of all empirical papers published over the past decade come from WEIRD universities. Yet, the largest countries in the world, arguably with the most entrepreneurs, China and India, are non-WEIRD.

The article argues that these papers and the wider research constellation that they populate are not covering issues that apply to most entrepreneurs, and perhaps they are even consciously ignoring them. For example, the article states, “WEIRD entrepreneurship research studying high-tech, venture capital-funded firms, often overlooks low-tech, family-funded and subsistence-based” entrepreneurs, possibly out of a bias for Western business leaders with years of schooling.

Ultimately, the study calls for more funded research to come out of non-WEIRD contexts, or for more international students to receive the opportunity to come to schools like Mendoza for degrees and then take that knowledge back to apply to their home country contexts.

This framework offers real-world lessons for American entrepreneurs fighting to launch a business in an economy with little visibility, where entrepreneurship has been in a consistent state of decline since the 1970s.

Shepherd believes that non-WEIRD entrepreneurs can help founders answer questions like: How do we make do with fewer resources? And, how do we combine resources in new ways?” The answer, he said, doesn’t require venture capital. It requires bootstrapping with less money and likely working a day job, while proving a concept.

“What we can learn from entrepreneurs in South Africa or India is that often entrepreneurship comes about as a way to overcome the boundaries that society has placed on you,” such as extreme poverty, the caste system or medical disability.  

Entrepreneurship’s Dark Side 

More recently, Shepherd has been investigating the dark, destructive and corrupt side of entrepreneurship, such as animal cruelty in cockfighting and in Ponzi schemes. “Entrepreneurship is often seen as a tool for good. But just as a hammer can be used for good or evil, so can entrepreneurship. We try to understand how it can cause people to behave in ways that are destructive to one another or the environment,” he explained.

For example, in a 2026 paper published in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, “The Underbelly of Entrepreneurship,” the authors align on a working definition of destructive entrepreneurship: “entrepreneurial action in pursuit of a potential opportunity with disregard to the likelihood that this action will lead to social, environmental, and/or economic outcomes that are more harmful than beneficial.”

The paper, co-authored by Vangelis Souitaris of Bayes Business School and Chase, lays out a comprehensive framework for evaluating whether an entrepreneurial venture is beneficial or dangerous to society. The research equips policymakers and founders with tools to make ethical decisions that “mitigate potential harm.”

Now, Shepherd and Chase, a Ph.D. in Management candidate at Mendoza, are taking that research even further by digging deep into extreme right-wing YouTube personalities who persuade gullible viewers to purchase pills, vitamins and IV drips that aren’t FDA-approved, and to sign up for costly subscription programs that they don’t need and can’t afford. “These are business models where entrepreneurs are exploiting people’s uncertainty,” Shepherd said.

Even with tenure and four honorary doctorates, Shepherd still feels morally compelled to continue his research and writing.

“I like to think that my best work is still ahead of me,” he said simply. “I’m still pushing hard on things.The Global Award frees me up to go after those home run ideas, swinging to hit a ball over the fence.”