Betsy Campbell

 

Betsy Campbell uses the tools of Linguistic Anthropology to study corporate and community evolution. As a PhD student at University of Exeter she analyzes entrepreneurial innovational as interpersonal phenomenon. In her private life, she is a published poet and playwright; she is currently authoring a piece of documentary theater about end-of-life care.

Campbell's doctoral work includes a micro-analysis of the interactions of high-tech founding teams navigating the early stages of entrepreneurial ventures. The research about language, collaboration, and teams builds on previous work by Yochai Benkler, Amy Edmondson, and Karl Weick and is revealing something about the ways that teams transform opportunities from ideas to results.

As a playwright, Campbell gives close attention to how real people speak in real-time. Documentary theater uses fact-based information such as newspaper articles or letters as the foundation for the script. She has been gathering oral histories of people involved in the delivery end-of-life hospice care. From those narratives she is crafting a script to stimulate public dialogue about end-of-life care options. So far excerpts from the emerging work (funded by the Ghiso Foundation) have been read at the Hastings Center and at the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.

She holds undergraduate degrees in English and in Theater, a masters degree in Education, and a certificate of study in Bioethics. She is a frequent speaker and group facilitator on topics including entrepreneurship, innovation, and the idea of the "good life" (including contemporary ideals for a good death).