The Spiro Center is pleased to publish the following announcement from the Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research (FSF) and the Swedish Business Development Agency (NUTEK). The FSF-NUTEK Award is the most prestigious award in its field, and receives national and international attention each year. It was launched in 1996 and consists of a statuette and $50,000. The winner is elected annually by the Award Committee of The Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research. The award is given to a person who has produced scientific work of outstanding quality and importance, providing significant contribution concerning theory-building in entrepreneurship and small business development, the role and importance of new firm formation, and the role of small businesses in economic development.

William B Gartner, Arthur M. Spiro Professor of Entrepreneurial Leadership at Clemson University, is a world-class scholar. On Thursday May 19th he accepted the FSF-NUTEK Award from the Swedish Minister for Industry and Trade. Gartner has for the last 25 years been highly influential in entrepreneurship education and research and for this achievement has already got several awards. Over the years Gartner has published an impressing number of articles in top journals on new venture creation and entrepreneurial behaviour. The influence of professor Gartner is not only due to him being a widely cited scholar, he is also as a person who engages in real-life entrepreneurship and education.

Professor Gartner combines the best of two research traditions: one based in a positivist tradition, frequent in the US; one based in a more hermeneutic tradition, more common in Europe. The contribution of professor Gartner is that he has shown and still shows us ways to increase our knowledge of entrepreneurship by using both these routes, parallel or simultaneously. As examples of his achievements he was co-founder of the Entrepreneurship Research Consortium in 1995, which initiated, developed and managed the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, the first major national longitudinal dataset on nascent entrepreneurship exploring how entrepreneurs find and identify opportunities, recognize and solve start-up problems, and take action to successfully launch new ventures. He is also lead editor on a recently published comprehensive overview of this study. Another achievement of professor Gartner is that he constantly questions the field and how we research it, thereby helping establishing a sound theoretical core that builds on the reality of entrepreneurs. Currently he is collecting and analyzing the stories entrepreneurs tell about their entrepreneurial adventures and we eagerly await the results of this and other endeavours of his.

For more information about the FSF-NUTEK Award, please click here