Engaged Scholars: Andrea Contigiani

April 2025

Engaged Scholars is a series highlighting Ohio State faculty who have made an impact in our communities through their community-engaged research and teaching.

Andrea Contigiani
Assistant Professor
Fisher College of Business, Department of Management and Human Resources

My community engaged scholarship is based on project Leveraging Entrepreneurship to Empower Refugees in Central Ohio. This work was a collaboration with Arati Maleku (Ohio State), Sehun Oh (Ohio State), Spencer Long (Nationwide Children's Hosptial/Ohio State alumnus) and Fabrizio Dell'Acqua (Harvard University). The program, launched in fall 2022, offered entrepreneurship training to refugees based in central Ohio. This work is the first of a series of studies we expect to conduct in this domain. In essence, we are trying to test the hypothesis that entrepreneurship training improves the socioeconomic integration of refugees in America.

Why is it important to engage the community in your research and teaching?

My view is that, in my own field (business/economics) as well as in the broader social science space, a lot of research tends to have little impact in society. Partly due to how the research process works and the incentives universities provide, scholars tend to prioritize rigor at the cost of relevance. Personally, a lot of my motivation for getting into academia was to have a positive impact on society. One way I try to do that is to engage with the community through research and teaching. This project is an example of how I did that. Of course, this is just a start - I certainly need to and can do more.

What led you to the path of engaged scholarship? How did you get started?

This line of work started about a decade ago, when I was a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. In the 2010s, immigration waves into the U.S. and Europe increased. And, perhaps most importantly, this phenomenon became more salient to the general population, through social media, political debate and other channels. I felt that it was important for me to try to understand this problem empirically and, if possible, offer solutions. After a couple of proof-of-concept efforts, this project was my first (arguably) successful attempt to doing engaged scholarship at scale.

How has your scholarship benefited from engaging with community partners?

I learned a lot about the topic - how entrepreneurship training impacts refugees and other refugee-like individuals - and, more importantly, about doing research in the community. Besides the usual work (i.e., theorizing, data collection, statistical analysis, etc), this approach presents several other logistical and ethical challenges. This made the project more complex and time-consuming than, I believe, any other project I have worked on. Now I will take these lessons with me in future engaged scholarship, as well as in more "traditional" research (i.e., collecting and analyzing secondary data).

What has been a highlight of your community engagement experience?

Once the study officially ended in fall 2023, I thought I'd lose contact with our participants. Instead, to my surprise, most of them stayed in touch with me. I continue to mentor some of these folks, as they contemplate entrepreneurial initiatives. And more broadly, I offer career advice to many of them. I want to share one recent story. One of our participants was an adult from Afghanistan. Shortly after moving to the U.S., he joined our program in fall 2022. We stayed in touch. I tried to mentor him along the way, as he tried to get into graduate school. This year he joined the MPA at Ohio States Glenn College of Public Affairs. In other words, he went from war to one of the top MPAs in the U.S. This sort of news is the greatest reward from this kind of work.

What advice would you give to faculty and students who are interested in engaging the community in their scholarship?

The key suggestion I would give myself and everyone else doing work in the community is to start by building a bridge with the population much earlier than the beginning of the research project. Connecting with the community is critical in making the research successful. It allows the research team to understand the context better, making sure the research design is consistent with the needs of the community. Plus, it allows the community to build trust in the research team, which is essential through the research project. While there are several ways to build this bridge, my preferred route is to conduct a series of data-collection-free focus groups.

Sample Engaged Scholarship

Here are some of the outcomes of this project:

• The research explores the motivations, barriers and behaviors of aspiring entrepreneurs in the refugee community. We combine survey data and qualitative interviews to identify several empirical patterns, some of which are novel to the literature, because this population has been traditionally hard to reach. We are about to submit a paper to the Academy of Management Discoveries, a well-regarded academic journal in the field of management.
• The project received praise from several stakeholders in the greater Columbus region. For example, the Columbus Dispatch wrote this article at the end of the program.
• I am designing a new undergraduate course, Social Entrepreneurship, building on the insights of this work. The goal is to equip students to learn about how to generate business ideas that benefit society while being financially sustainable. The refugee community is one of the key contexts for this entrepreneurial work.
• Our idea of offering entrepreneurship training to the refugee community has had impact beyond our own project. For example, ETSS, one of our key partners in the program, has continued offering entrepreneurial programming to their network.