Centre Member
Majella is interested in how location matters for entrepreneurs and management teams in terms of scaling their business. In particular, she is interested in the significance of spatial proximity to other actors, such as other entrepreneurs/managers who have scaled businesses, star scientists in the same or similar sectors, enterprise-support organisations, and large MNEs that may act as catalysts or inhibitors to firm scaling. Majella’s research typically focuses at a regional level. Using longitudinal research on the Medical Technology ecosystem in Galway that includes rich data from interviews conducted with entrepreneurs and foreign owned subsidiaries over an almost 20-year period, as well as the development of a historical database of company activity, Majella has addressed research questions such as: how knowledge specialisation and diversification in an entrepreneurial ecosystem evolves over time in a region (e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08985626.2020.1734260); how multinational enterprise subsidiary strategies evolve so the subsidiary role transforms from a competence exploiter to a competence creator; how the competency and capability requirements of entrepreneurs and innovators changes over time as an ecosystem develops and matures; and how the internationalisation strategies of indigenous SMEs are influenced by MNE linkages
