During his academic career, that spanned over 40 years, Arnold Cooper made several contributions to the overall knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship.
His father worked as a railway postal clerk on the train line between Chicago and Cincinnati, where the family moved when Arnold was three years old.
In the fall that same year, he went to college at Purdue University, in Lafayette, Indiana, as a chemical engineering major.
After graduating The MBA program at Purdue University in 1957, Cooper worked for a year at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, but then he got accepted as a PhD student at Harvard Business School, Boston, where he went in the fall of 1958.
At Harvard, Cooper started working with Professor W. Arnold Hosmer who studied small growing technological firms in the Boston area.
Cooper did his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Hosmer, after he was finished he stayed on as a teacher at Harvard Business School between 1961 and 1963.
In 1963, Cooper returned to Purdue University and the Krannert School of Management, as an assistant professor.
[3] Arnold Cooper is considered to be one of the pioneering scholars in the field of entrepreneurship as well as strategic management.
In the articles, Cooper argued against the idea that larger companies enjoyed many advantages over smaller ones, especially in R&D, which was the prevailing view of the time.
[5] A few years later (1968), while working as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Cooper conducted a groundbreaking study of spin-offs in technology-based firms in Silicon Valley.
This time the goal was to answer questions about the entrepreneurial process, and the focus of the study was newly started firms.
Hosmer, Larue, Cooper & Vesper (1977) The Entrepreneurial Function: Text and Cases in the Management of Smaller Firms.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall, Inc. Cooper, A., Dunkelberg, W., Woo, C. & William Dennis Jr. (1990) New Business in America: The Firms and their Owners.