As an ethnomethodologist, Dr. Betsy Campbell studies the practices of teams at the forefront of technological innovation and new venture creation. In her work as an associate teaching professor at Penn State, Campbell leads the entrepreneurship minor in the College of IST and directs The Cape (Community Advancing Pluralism in Entrepreneurship) at Penn State, a national initiative addressing matters of diversity, inclusion, and belonging in innovative entrepreneurship. She is a Fulbright Specialist in AI and Society issues and the recipient of two Academy of Management awards: the 2020 Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy award and the 2022 Entrepreneurship as Practice award.
Earlier in her career, Campbell founded high-tech companies, helped create a business unit within an established company (acquired by Lucent for $1.5B), and launched a 501(c)(3) (Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs) which she grew to over 5,000 members worldwide before leaving to get her PhD She also was the co-director for the MIT Community Innovation Lab. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, RSM Foundation, and Anchor Point Foundation.
Campbell is an active author and artist. She has published two books with Routledge — Practice Theory in Action: Empirical Studies of Interaction in Innovation and Entrepreneurship and The Innovator's Discussion: The Conversational Skills of Entrepreneurial Teams — as well as a growing collection of chapters and articles. She has been a visiting scholar at the Hastings Center, a virtual resident with Jacob's Pillow, and a fellow with the Edgelands Institute. In each of these contexts she has developed unconventional artful works about the ways that technologies give shape to and are shaped by contemporary social practices. A recent work debuted at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.
Her University affiliations include the Penn State Arts and Design Research Incubator, the ENTI (Entrepreneurship and Innovation) minor, and the Nittany AI Challenge. Beyond Penn State, she is affiliated with the Explorers Club, the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Alumni Council, the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab, and the Alan Turing Institute's AI and Arts group. Recently, she was an invited participant in the Smithsonian Apollo Dialogues Workshop associated with the 50th anniversaries of the NASA moon landings.
