Elham Asgari, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship in the College of Business, and co-authors Richard A. Hunt and S. M. Abidul Islam were awarded the Tariq Farid Franchise Institute Award for Best Paper on the Topic of Franchising at the 2024 Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC). The award will be presented at the 2025 BCERC Conference, June 4-7 at Babson College.
The award-winning paper is titled, “Franchising in the Metaverse: Entrepreneurial Pathways for Virtual and Mixed Reality.” An abstract of the paper is below.
Asgari’s research interests include corporate entrepreneurship, technological innovations, star employees, and the small satellite industry. She is a Charles C. and John G. Gates Professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Hunt is associate professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Virginia Tech; Islam is PhD student at Virginia Tech studying strategy and entrepreneurship.
Paper abstract: Despite predictions that the emergence of digital platform technologies would upend the long-standing presence and impact of franchised businesses, in actuality the entrepreneurial deployment of franchise-based business models has shaped and expanded commercial opportunities arising through emergent technologies. This is particularly true concerning the metaverse, where service providers and consumers confront an ambiguous decisional landscape and where viable strategies to generate revenue are in short supply. Through the conceptual lens of business model evolution, we investigate how the entrepreneurial deployment of franchised brands offers metaverse users a source of familiarity that eases navigation between physical reality and digital virtuality, while generating significant franchisee revenue. Applying extant theories of entrepreneurial franchising and business model emergence, we develop and test a novel perspective on the symbiotic, value-generating benefits lying at the nexus of entrepreneurial franchising and the metaverse.