Prof pens award-winning paper

Canada’s indigenous peoples have long faced devastating social and economical problems, and having entrepreneurial programs geared specifically toward them is not helping, says one UOIT researcher in an award-winning paper.

Dr. Laura Pinto, a professor in the university’s Faculty of Education, won the award for best paper at the eighth-annual Conference of the Academy of Innovation and Entrepreneurship alongside co-author Levon Blue of Griffith University in Nathan, Australia.

The paper, titled Visions of Aboriginal Entrepreneurship Financing in Canada’s CAPE Fund*: Walking the Fine Line Between Self-Determination and Colonization, ponders how to eliminate what the authors see as segregated entrepreneurship and instead bring indigenous knowledge in mainstream business education and practice.

“Canada needs to have a serious conversation about the intersections between indigenous enterprise, limited and sometimes inflexible funding structures, and self-determination,” states Pinto in a news release. “Levon Blue and I hope our work will extend thinking and practice beyond the limitations of conventional notions of entrepreneurship. For example, the way a company’s value is assessed often fails to account for non-economic factors that are equally important ‘success’ criteria – such as the consideration of decolonization.”

The paper is set to be published in an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies.