David Y. Choi, Ph.D.
Conrad N. Hilton Chair of Entrepreneurship, College of Business Administration
Media
Biography
Dr. David Y. Choi is the Conrad N. Hilton Chair of Entrepreneurship and director of the nationally-ranked Fred Kiesner Center for Entrepreneurship at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). He has been a faculty member at LMU since 2003 and has taught undergraduate, MBA, and Executive MBA courses in entrepreneurship, including new venture creation, entrepreneurial finance, social entrepreneurship and technology management. He is a recipient of the President’s Fritz B. Burns Distinguished Teaching Award at LMU and Innovative Pedagogy Award from the United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
Dr. Choi writes broadly in the areas entrepreneurship and innovation and is a co-author of Values-Centered Entrepreneurs and Their Companies. David has been featured or quoted in major news outlets including Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Business Journal, Fortune Magazine, The Guardian, Business2.0, Economy Chosen, Korea Daily and Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Choi has started, managed, and owned businesses in several industries including biotechnology, software, financial services, energy and foods – several of which have been acquired or gone public. He has also been an advisor for a number of venture capital firms. Earlier in his career, he worked with The Boston Consulting Group and Harvard Business School. Dr. Choi received his B.S and M.S in Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley and Ph.D. in Technology Management from UCLA.
Education
University of California at Los Angeles
Ph.D.
Management
1997
University of California at Berkeley
MS
Industrial Engineering
1990
University of California at Berkeley
B.Sc.
Industrial Engineering
1989
Social
Areas of Expertise
Industry Expertise
Accomplishments
Entrepreneurial Mindset Trainings for North Korean Refugee Entrepreneurs
2020-10-19
Alex Glosenberg and David Choi completed a month-long series of entrepreneurial mindset trainings for North Korean refugee entrepreneurs. The trainings focused on facilitating the entrepreneurs’ psychological empowerment–specifically helping them to translate their pre-existing resilience, innovativeness, and proactivity into effective strategies and raising their entrepreneurial self-efficacy.
Media Appearances
How we chose 2017's most disruptive innovators
CNBC online
2017-05-16
CNBC's Disruptor 50 Advisory Council — a group of 39 leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship — then ranked the quantitative criteria by importance in ability to disrupt established industries and public companies. This year the council found that scalability and user growth were the most important criteria, and these categories received the highest weighting.
High schoolers can't bank on their knowledge of money matters. These educators want to change that
Los Angeles Times online
2016-09-01
Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles is trying to help, offering financial literacy “boot camps” for high school students.
Palos Verdes High dropout-turned-millionaire Justin Yoshimura helps Loyola Marymount entrepreneurs
Daily Breeze online
2014-10-20
Justin Yoshimura dropped out of high school, became an entrepreneur, and now is CEO of 500friends, a service that helps small online retailers.
Southern California universities foster student innovation with tech incubators
Daily Breeze online
2014-10-19
As young entrepreneurs in Los Angeles’ tech community continue to grab headlines with their multimillion-dollar companies, universities in Southern California are creating programs that cater to the new American Dream: launch a startup, disrupt an industry, change the world.
Event Appearances
G20 Young Entrepreneurship Alliance Saudi 2020 Virtual Summit.
Entrepreneurship is a source of Innovation and Resilience Virtual
2020-10-30
Articles
Transformational Leadership and Attorneys’ Performance in Law Firms: An Examination of Multilevel Moderated Mediation
International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research2020-03-29
This study examines how transformational leadership on the part of senior attorneys in law firms may affect their subordinate attorneys' performance in an industry experiencing both distinctive leadership challenges and widespread economic upheaval. Specifically, our multilevel theoretical model attempts to capture the moderated mediation relationships between transformational leadership, innovative climate, entrepreneurial orientation, and individual performance.
Net Job Creation in an Increasingly Autonomous Economy
Journal of Management Inquiry2019-02-04
One of the world’s most pressing concerns in the next few decades will be job creation. The biggest cause for concern may be the accelerating advances in technology radically reducing the human role in production of goods and services. In this increasingly “autonomous economy”, managers and policy makers must develop strategies and policies to ensure that the impending technological progress leads to “net job creation,” that is, a net positive effect on the overall employment level in the economy. In this effort, this article presents a new perspective and analysis of the net job creation process and the challenges to employment that technology poses. Also discussed are potential managerial and public policy alternatives that may slow the job loss and help cope with the potential consequence of permanent underemployment.
Entrepreneurs as Rulers? Insights from Analyzing the Connection between Social Dominance Orientation and Entrepreneurial Intention
Journal of Applied Social Psychology2018-10-18
Can individuals’ preference for social hierarchies and inequality affect their intention to pursue entrepreneurship? We surveyed university students in two countries and discovered that the answer may be context‐dependent.
CEOs' Leadership Styles and Managers' Innovative Behaviour: Investigation of Intervening Effects in an Entrepreneurial Context
Journal of Management Studies2015-03-05
We examine the relationships and intervening mechanisms between founding CEOs' transformational/transactional leadership and the innovative behaviour of managers. We develop and test our hypotheses on a sample of 39 participating CEOs and 105 managers with the use of a multilevel structural equation model. The results show that both transformational and transactional leadership on the part of the CEO relate positively to managers' innovative behaviour. We also discover that firm's innovative climate mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and innovative behaviour. However, we fail to find the mediating effect of innovative climate between transactional leadership and innovative behaviour. Our findings contribute to an improved understanding of how founding CEOs' different leadership styles affect employees' innovative behaviour in start-ups and to what extent the innovative climate influences the relationship.
Do Entrepreneurial Companies Make Good Corporate Citizens?
Journal of Enterprising Culture2014-03-01
Do entrepreneurial companies make responsible corporate citizens? In this paper, we examine the relationship between companies' entrepreneurial orientation and their corporate citizenship. An empirical study consisting of 261 South Korean firms reveals that entrepreneurial orientation does not have direct causal effect on corporate citizenship. Analysis also shows that market orientation has full mediation effect between entrepreneurial orientation and corporate citizenship. The findings indicate that entrepreneurial companies may indeed act more responsibly if they are also market oriented. Practical implications are discussed.
Examining Entrepreneurial Cognition: An Occupational Analysis of Balanced Linear and Nonlinear Thinking and Entrepreneurship Success
Journal of Small Business Management2011-06-23
Entrepreneurial intent and subsequent activity are increasingly recognized as vital to economic viability and growth, and particularly worthy of considerable support and resource investment in education and economic policy
Socially Responsible Entrepreneurs: What Do They Do (To Create and Build Their Companies)?
Business Horizons2008-07-15
This paper examines 30 entrepreneurs who created profitable companies, and who were also exemplary in their efforts towards social responsibility. It examines their management practices to understand how these socially responsible entrepreneurs created and built their companies.
Venture Development Processes of Sustainable Entrepreneurs
Management Research News2008-06-20
The purpose of this paper is to examine the venture development processes (or “entrepreneurial processes”) of “sustainable” entrepreneurs, i.e. entrepreneurs who create and build profitable companies that also pursue environmental or social causes. The paper aims to find how these mission‐oriented entrepreneurs achieve their business objectives while serving their social and environmental causes.
Social Capital and the Performance of Asian American-Founded Ventures in Silicon Valley (Interactive Paper)
Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research2008-01-01
We analyze the relative performance of Asian American-founded ventures (relative to those founded by non-Asian American or “mainstream” entrepreneurs) in terms of time-to-IPO, market valuation at IPO, and post-IPO performance.
Homeboy Industries: An Incubator of Hope and Businesses
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice2007-08-17
This case presents the story of Homeboy Industries, which was founded by Father Greg Boyle, S.J. to offer employment opportunities to former gang members in East Los Angeles. Homeboy Industries has successfully launched several businesses to hire and train “homies” who otherwise may not have found jobs. Michael Baca, the new operations director, is faced with the decision of whether to pursue expansion of the promising merchandising division. Complicating the decision is the need to balance both the social and business objectives of Homeboy Industries while dealing with the organization's extreme shortage of managerial and financial resources. This depiction of an unusual entrepreneurial environment also illustrates several organizational challenges and philosophical dilemmas that are common among social ventures.
Online Piracy, Innovation, and the Legitimate Business Models
Technovation2006-11-14
This explorative paper examines the impact of online piracy on innovation and the creation of new, legitimate businesses. While viewed only as a legal matter, online piracy has shown to be an important source of technological and strategic innovation to both industry incumbents and newcomers.
The Development Processes and Performances of Asian American-Founded Ventures in Silicon Valley
Journal of Private Equity2005-07-05
This article examines the development patterns and performances of companies founded by Asian American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and compares them with those of companies founded by non-Asian Americans. The authors find that companies founded by Asian Americans tended to have more Asian Americans in the executive team than those founded by their counterparts.
The Shortcomings of a Global Knowledge Management System: The Case of Accenture
Academy of Management Executive2005-05-03
This study examines the global knowledge management (KM) experiences of Accenture, a pioneer in organization-wide KM efforts. We interviewed 18 KM managers and consultants in its U.S. and East Asian offices. We found that despite its significant efforts, Accenture was falling short of fully harnessing and transferring management knowledge across its global organization.
The All-American Beer: An Example of Inferior Standard Prevailing
Business Horizons2005-02-02
America's preference for homogeneous, bland-tasting beer may have been largely derived not from an efficient, market-clearing equilibrium, but rather as a result of a series of interesting historical processes and events. The authors argue that the U.S. market may have become locked in a sub-optimal equilibrium in which most consumers are no longer familiar with the full range of what beer is and can be.
Patterns of Strategy Innovation
European Management Journal2001-08-08
The authors examine nearly 200 corporate strategies which promised innovation at the level of the business model, and which were successful. They distill ten essential ‘innovation themes’ which provide basic elements for a fresh perspective on strategy. In particular, the themes can be used in two ways to devise a business strategy. Corporate examples are given of each innovation theme.
