Notre Dame business professor wins prestigious entrepreneurship award

Dean Shepherd, Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, has been named the winner of the 2025 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, the most prestigious award for outstanding research contributions in this subject area.

Dean Shepherd

The award is given to a scholar who has produced scientific work of outstanding quality and importance, thereby making a significant contribution to theory-building concerning entrepreneurship and small business development, the role and importance of new firm formation, and the role of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in economic development. The award is sponsored by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum, innovation agency Vinnova and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

“For almost three decades, Dean Shepherd has had an unparalleled impact on scholarly developments within the international community of entrepreneurship researchers,” according to the awards committee, which consists of six committee members who hold or have held a full professorship at a Swedish university working on small business and entrepreneurship issues.

“His extraordinarily broad and methodologically varied research has had a profound influence on research on several central aspects of the entrepreneurial process. By engaging with topics such as entrepreneurial failure and emotions, and by investigating entrepreneurship under challenging environmental conditions and adversity, he has led the way in asking and answering important but traditionally neglected and downplayed aspects of entrepreneurship.”

The Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, launched in 1996, bestows “The Hand of God” statuette and €100,000. Shepherd will receive the award during a ceremony in Stockholm on June 2.

Shepherd, who joined Notre Dame in 2017, researches and teaches in the area of the cognitive-emotional mechanisms of potential opportunities, new ventures, entrepreneurial responses to adversity, and entrepreneurial creation and destruction. A fellow of the Academy of Management, he has been awarded four honorary doctorates from Jonkoping University (Sweden), Technical University of Munich (Germany), Lulea University of Technology (Sweden), and Hanken School of Economics (Finland).

His awards include the Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award, the Mentor Award, and the Foundational Paper Award. A past editor-in-chief of the Journal Business Venturing, Shepherd has authored more than 20 books and 180 publications in top management and entrepreneurship journals with over 90,000 Google citations.