Data-Driven Decision Making in Entrepreneurship: Tools for Maximizing Human Capital

There is a large gap in entrepreneurship research when it comes to human capital data analytics. However, organizational sciences have made significant advancements in this area.

Dr. Nikki Blacksmith is Co-Founder and CEO of Blackhawke Behavior Science and an adjunct faculty member at American University in Washington, DC. She serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Army Research Institute for Social and Behavioral Sciences and is on the Board of Directors of a Sembramos, a nonprofit dedicated to building antiracist organizations. She is an Associate Editor for the journal Personnel Assessments and Decisions, a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Business and Psychology, and serves in multiple leadership roles for the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology. Dr. Blacksmith received her M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and her Ph.D. from the George Washington University in Industrial-Organizational Psychology.

Dr. Maureen E. McCusker is Co-Founder & COO of Blackhawke Behavior Science and Senior Research Analyst at Virginia Commonwealth University. As an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, she has spent the last decade working with and studying leaders and teams in organizations from a wide variety of sectors, including corporate Fortune 500, medical, legal, academic, military, and non-profit. She has earned several awards and grants for scholarly research from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Virginia Tech, and the Department of Defense. Dr. McCusker serves as a Senior Research Fellow for the U.S. Army Research Institute. She holds a Ph.D. and a M.S. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Virginia Tech and a B.A. in Psychology and French from Georgetown University.