QUT Professor Per Davidsson has been honoured with the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research for “his role as a pioneer of influential and high-quality research contributions and as a community builder in the entrepreneurship field”.
The prestigious award brings with it a prize of €100,000 (A$160,500).
Professor Davidsson holds the Talbot Family Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research (ACE) in the QUT Business School, and is known for his extensive research on start-up and growth of firms, particularly from the perspective of society’s wellbeing and job creation.
“I’m particularly pleased that the award citation highlights “community building” because this is something I have devoted much effort to in building research centres and in the leadership of large panel studies of business start-up processes in America, Australia, and Sweden,” Professor Davidsson said.
“I am proud of my role in taking research on this important societal phenomenon from obscurity to an essential feature, both in quality and quantity, of management and organization studies.
“The recent Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research Exchange Conference (ACERE) demonstrated researchers’ ability to sustain and enhance the world-class standards established during my directorship of ACE.
“In the service of building entrepreneurial communities I am organising an international workshop and website pertaining to scholarship on external enablement, that is about how various changes to the business environment create potential for entrepreneurs to initiate and improve new business ventures.”
Professor Davidsson founded the ACE at QUT in 2010 and served as its director until 2018; he was a member of the leadership team of the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management from 2007 to 2012, serving as chair from 2010 to 2011; and led the Program on Entrepreneurship and Growth at Sweden’s Jönköping International Business School (circa 1998-2002).
He has led several major research programs including the Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE), the largest study of business start-ups ever undertaken in Australia.
Professor Davidsson has published more than 90 peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals as well as a large number of books, reports, and book chapters. With more than 45,000 citations, he is one of the best cited scholars in entrepreneurship globally.
He has served as associate editor for three of the leading scholarly journals in entrepreneurship and currently serves on the editorial boards for several other journals. He is also an award-winning mentor.
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