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2023 Per Davidsson

Queensland University of Technology
Jönköping International Business School

For his role as a pioneer of influential and high-quality research contributions and as a community builder in the entrepreneurship field.

Motivation

Professor Per Davidsson personifies the pioneering, engaged and inclusive scholarship that has been decisive in the development of the field of entrepreneurship, making highly significant contributions during an extraordinarily productive career. His research on entrepreneurship and culture, and his studies on the growth of small businesses, have contributed fundamentally to the emergence, consolidation and flourishing of entrepreneurship as a scholarly field.

Throughout his career, Professor Davidsson has challenged prevailing assumptions and concepts, contributing to the critical refinement and renewal of the field and moving it forward. He has added enormously to our understanding of a variety of central phenomena in entrepreneurship. His books are foundational and are widely used in higher education.

Through his mentoring and academic engagement, Professor Davidsson played a central role in creating a vibrant, global community of entrepreneurship researchers. During his early career, he ran the Wallenberg Foundations-funded Program on Entrepreneurship and Growth (PEG) at Jönköping International Business School, Sweden. Under his leadership, PEG gave PhD students and junior researchers the opportunity to engage with internationally distinguished entrepreneurship scholars and build strong collaborative research networks. At a time when the field was still emerging, PEG facilitated the formation of a world-wide community of entrepreneurship researchers critical to its further development. Professor Davidsson thereby injected new momentum into the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management.

By bringing together scholars from across the world, Professor Davidsson has enabled researchers in the field to meet, interact, and transform the field of entrepreneurship into a vibrant and well-respected domain of scientific inquiry. With this award, the committee recognizes his role as both a pioneer and a community builder in the field of entrepreneurship.

Titles, dates and places given above refer to the time of the Award.


Documents

Per Davidsson Presentation Article.pdf
Per Davidsson Biography.pdf
Per Davidsson Prize Lecture.pdf


Photo Gallery

Moderator, Åsa Sandberg, and Per Davidsson before giving the Prize Lecture, May 2023.

Per Davidsson receiving the Prize from the Swedish Minister for Finance, Elisabeth Svantesson, May 2023.

Elisabeth Svantesson, Minister for Finance, Per Davidsson and Martin Andersson, chairman of the Prize Committee, after receiving the Prize, May 2023.