Laurier professor Nicole Coviello ranked in the top one per cent of her field for research citations

March 31, 2021

Nicole Coviello has long been recognized as a leading researcher in her field. In 2020 alone, she was inducted into the prestigious Academy of International Business and named the inaugural Lazaridis Chair of International Entrepreneurship and Innovation. A recent study from Stanford University confirms her place in the top one per cent of business and management researchers worldwide.

The Stanford team built a database ranking the top 100,000 scholars globally across 174 fields based on the number of citations of their work between 1960 and 2019. Coviello, a professor of Marketing at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, was one of 19 Laurier professors who rank in the top two per cent of their field, including her Lazaridis School colleague Professor Emeritus Phelim Boyle. With more than 18,000 total citations to date, Coviello is in the top one per cent of her major academic subfield, business and management, illustrating the wide international influence of her research.

“It’s fun to see,” says Coviello. “I’m thankful that people are reading my work and building on it through their own research.”

Advent of a research field

Coviello attributes her prolific research output to a combination of passion and competitive spirit. Her drive was sparked early in her career when she felt underestimated by her academic colleagues.

“I completed my PhD at the University of Auckland, and New Zealand follows a British model for PhD training rather than a North American one,” says Coviello. “When I was hired for my first position at a Canadian university, I had to prove myself to people who were not convinced that I had the right training to get tenure in the North American system. But I worked hard to show them they were wrong, and I really haven’t looked back.”

Coviello’s time in New Zealand helped shape her research focus on startup technology companies. She was first introduced to the world of technology management while completing her master’s degree at the University of Saskatchewan during the 1980s, a time when the city of Saskatoon was aspiring to become known as “Silicon Flats.” For her dissertation, Coviello found herself studying technology firms from Kitchener to California.

“Then I moved to New Zealand and was surrounded by two things: lots of small firms and the rise of the computer software industry,” says Coviello. “New Zealand has a tiny domestic market, so young companies with niche software products had to sell internationally. As I was studying their development patterns, other researchers started popping up in countries like Ireland. Their findings were similar enough that we started to look at the pool of insights that were emerging. That helped develop a field that integrates international business and entrepreneurship: international entrepreneurship.”

In parallel with her work in international entrepreneurship, Coviello also studies marketing strategy and business networks. She refers to her research interests as a “triumvirate.”

“Marketing informs entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship informs international business, and so on,” she says. “It all kind of integrates.”

Above all, an educator

Since joining Laurier in 2008, research has remained a strong focus in Coviello’s career. She co-founded the Lazaridis Institute for the Management of Technology Enterprises and served as its first research director. In that role, Coviello built a network of domestic and international scholars to help position the Lazaridis Institute as leader of research on high-growth technology firms. She also maintains editorial board positions at numerous journals and is the associate editor of the Journal of Business Venturing.

Coviello’s five-year appointment as the Lazaridis Chair of International Entrepreneurship and Innovation is the first of its kind at Laurier, mandated to provide leadership in the development of a research program on the growth and internationalization of scaling firms. Among her current research projects is a study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada investigating the drivers of performance in young technology companies.

“We just finished two years of data collection and have insights from more than 500 senior managers and employees,” says Coviello. “We are analyzing many different factors, from the composition of the senior management teams to the resiliency of employees to different sales, marketing and new product development capabilities.”

Coviello is also finalizing a project with her Lazaridis School colleagues Anne Domurath and Simon Taggar based on research conducted at the European Innovation Academy, an intensive, three-week technology accelerator.

“For the last few years, with the exception of last summer, we have taken Laurier students to an extreme accelerator in Europe where they join about 600 other students from around the world to develop business ideas that they ultimately present to a panel of venture capital executives,” says Coviello. “It’s an amazing learning experience. Almost every student we’ve taken has said, ‘This has completely changed me.’”

She adds, “For us, it was a great opportunity to watch and learn how startup teams function, and study the roles of passion and resilience as the participants move from creating ideas to pitching them.”

Student mentorship is the most fulfilling part of Coviello’s job and the number one reason she loves working at Laurier. Following a year-long sabbatical, she is glad to be returning to the classroom in May to teach a course on high technology marketing.

“This version of the course is based on my own research and what I learned while working at the Lazaridis Institute,” says Coviello. “This is the first time I’ve been able to teach this class and I’m super excited.”

Just as she is happy to have her work regularly cited by her peers, Coviello is now enjoying a career stage that she feels is less about her own research and more about helping her graduate students and junior faculty colleagues develop theirs.

“I’ve done a lot of interesting research, my work is being used, and now I have all of these smart people working around me,” she says. “It’s time to support them. First and foremost, I am an educator. I learned that from my Dad. Whether I’m teaching an undergraduate class or writing a paper, I’m educating. That’s my role and I like it.”