2018 Award Winner

Jerome Katz

Jerome (Jerry) Katz is a professor of entrepreneurship at the John Cook School of Business at Saint Louis University. Jerry came from a family of entrepreneurs, growing up in the various family businesses – sweeping floors and selling in his father’s discount store, clerking in the pharmacy, and selling auto parts on a route that took him to McNairy County, Tennessee, and the police car of Sheriff Buford Busser of Walking Tall fame. Jerry’s own business was a consulting firm that he sold before moving north to finish his education. That education took him all over – Rhodes College, American University, University of Memphis, Harvard, MIT and finally the University of Michigan, which (reluctantly) granted him a PhD and even helped him find a wife (of over 30 years now). Educated within an inch of his life, there was nothing left to do but teach, which he did first at Wharton until 1987 and since then at SLU. A lifelong entrepreneurship educator, he was identified as one of the tops in the field three times by Inc. Magazine, and by the Price-Babson Program, which gave him the Appel Award for Entrepreneurship Education. He has received other awards for his educational innovations from the Family Firm Institute, the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, and USASBE, where he is a Longenecker Fellow. He is the author of nearly 50 academic papers, and has six papers published in compendia of classic papers in entrepreneurship. His paper (with Bill Gartner) “Properties of Emerging Organizations” was identified as a Foundational Paper by the Academy of Management. He is founding editor of the Book Citation Index tracked annual research series Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth (Emerald) and the “Entrepreneurship and the Management of Growing Enterprises” series from Sage, but most people know him because of his entrepreneurship text Entrepreneurial Small Business (McGraw-Hill). Now in its fourth edition, ESB is built on the models from the entrepreneurship program at SLU, which has had national top-25 rankings every year since 1994, proving that a school with virtually no endowment can create and maintain a nationally competitive entrepreneurship program. Every attendee of the Experiential Classroom can obtain a copy of ESB from McGraw-Hill (contact Michael Gedatus), and the lessons underpinning ESB are reflected in Jerry’s presentations at EC. You can reach Jerry at katzja@slu.edu.