PhD students on the academic job market
The following Cambridge Judge Business School PhD students are currently seeking academic positions. Similar recent PhD graduates have taken postdoctoral or faculty positions at leading research institutions such as Erasmus, IESE Business School, London Business School, Warwick Business School, Imperial College Business School, University College London and INSEAD Asia.
Ariel de Fauconberg
Ariel (Ari) de Fauconberg is a PhD Candidate and Gates-Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. As a member of the Organisational Theory and Information Systems (OTIS) subject group, her work explores the challenges that organisations face as they innovate towards long-term social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Her research focuses on using ethnographic and qualitative methods to understand societally transformative technologies in the context of climate change, with her doctoral dissertation investigating barriers to pursuing net-zero aligned energy innovations as experienced by established fossil fuel incumbents, emerging climate technology ventures, and investors.
As a member of the WEF Expert Network, Ari co-authored a 2021 World Economic Forum white paper on SME resilience and sustainability and was the 2022 winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey & Co. Bracken Bower Prize for her book proposal about the pioneering work of climate technology entrepreneurs, based on ethnographic research from her PhD (forthcoming). Ari is a current member of the University of Cambridge’s Energy Policy Research Group (EPRG), the University of Cambridge-LMU Strategic Partnership (on Entrepreneurship research), and a former member of the Strategic Partnership Office’s ThinkLab Programme Spring/Summer 2021 collaboration with Cambridge Zero.
Ari holds a Master of Philosophy in Innovation, Strategy and Organisation from the University of Cambridge, an MBA (Hons) from Bentley University, a Master of Philosophy in Geography & the Environment (Dist.) from the University of Oxford, and a dual BA (Hons) in Anthropology and Architecture from Smith College. Prior to her PhD, Ari worked as a Research Fellow at Babson College conducting studies on clean energy entrepreneurship and female-led, high growth, high-potential firms. She has taught at the University of Oxford, Harvard Extension School, and the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, as well as worked for the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment and National Geographic.
Job market paper
“Values homophily in action: co-founder authentication processes during team formation”
Impact-focused venture founders engage in a process of team formation where they evaluate the skills and professional experience of co-founders as well as the extent to which these individuals affirm values-based commitments to social and environmental impact. Yet, an increasing flow of resources towards impact-focused entrepreneurship has also begun attracting a wider pool of potential entrepreneurs, that while performing interest in impact creation, vary significantly in their values. This consistency in the performance of values yet variance in actual underlying values is a product of institutional complexity, which can lead to foundational misalignment between founders and thus the eventual demise of early-stage ventures. In this paper, we seek to better understand this co-founder evaluative process by asking, how do entrepreneurs ensure values alignment within co-founding teams? Through an 18-month ethnographic study of a climate technology accelerator, we explore the role of values authentication processes during early-stage venture team formation. Our findings reveal a community-based process where founders’ values are authenticated through intensive scrutiny across 3 layers of public and private social arenas. These findings and our emergent model contribute to existing research on early-stage entrepreneurial team formation by specifying how values homophily occurs amid institutional complexity.