Felipe Massa

Felipe G. Massa joined the Loyola College of Business in 2012 after having received his Master’s Degree and Ph.D. in Organization Studies from Boston College and garnering several years of experience in the banking, software, and translation industries. He teaches experiential entrepreneurship and consulting classes that give undergraduate and graduate students the tools they need to build and improve organizations that strengthen their communities.

His research investigates the formation of innovative entities, practices, and ideas in diverse settings, including online communities and cultural industries such as architecture, music, and winemaking. He examines efforts by change agents to transpose and adapt old concepts, to associate previously unrelated ideas, and to balance the groundbreaking with the appropriate in the conception of novel organizations and ideas. In doing so, he systematically unveils the processes and mechanisms that drive and sustain entrepreneurial behavior. His work has appeared in various prestigious outlets, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, among other leading publications. He recently published “Entrepreneurship in the Wild: A Startup Field Guide” (MIT Press, 2021). This learn-by-doing guidebook balances practical advice with rigorous academic content. It introduces important concepts, provides highly engaging examples, and supplies the tools needed to put lessons into practice, creating a research-supported, step-by-step reference for developing, testing, and pitching any startup idea.

Dr. Massa has also contributed his time and expertise to the university and the local community. He is Co-founder and Faculty Director of the Loyola Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development – an entity tasked with making Loyola a regional leader in entrepreneurship education through the support of stakeholder engagement in entrepreneurial activities, as well as through the creation of innovative programs that enrich the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. He also serves as lead instructor of the Idea Village’s IDEAinstitute program, a community-focused pre-accelerator program that introduces innovative startups and potential startup founders to the tools they need to take their startup from an idea to a scalable business.

In recognition of his contributions to Loyola, the New Orleans community, and his field he was honored as the inaugural holder of the Thomas H. and Catherine B. Kloor Professorship in Entrepreneurship and Small Business. He also has been named to the Silicon Bayou 100, a list of the 100 most influential and active people in technology and entrepreneurship in Louisiana numerous times (2013-2019).