2010 Award Winner

Karl Vesper

Karl Vesper’s most recent academic appointment was last year when he held the Kent R. Hance Distinguished Visiting Regents Chair in Entrepreneurship at Texas Tech University. Previously he was an Emeritus Professor from the University of Washington where he held full professorships in Business Administration, he started and taught several entrepreneurship courses; in Mechanical Engineering, where he taught machine design, and in Marine Studies, where he taught ocean systems design. He has been a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at Trinity College, Dublin. He was the first holder of the Roger Babson Professorship in Entrepreneurship at Babson College and of the Carma Professorship of Entrepreneurship at the University of Calgary as well as the second holder of the Schoen Professorship in Entrepreneurship at Baylor University. More recently, he was a visiting professor in bioengineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting professor in entrepreneurship at the University of Hawaii, Hilo. Since the mid-1950s, following a two-year tour as an Air Force officer and flight test engineer at Edwards AFB, California, his main interest has been entrepreneurship. Industrially, he worked as assistant to the president of a high-performance electromotive products company and as business manager of an oceanographic consulting and instrument manufacturing company for which he helped raise venture capital. His current research focuses on trying to refine entrepreneurship technology through fractionation and application of a design portfolio approach. He holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Engineering from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard. His hobbies include motorcycles, snowboarding, surfing, and learning from his grandchildren.