2016 Award Winner

Michael Morris

Michael Morris holds the George and Lisa Etheridge Professorship at the University of Florida, where he is the Academic Director of the Entrepreneurship Program. He previously was the N. Malone Mitchell Chair and founded the School of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. In addition to starting three ventures, he has built top-ranked entrepreneurship programs at three major universities. A pioneer in curricular innovation and experiential learning, his entrepreneurial outreach efforts have facilitated the development of hundreds of ventures. He is the Director of the Experiential Classroom, founded in 1999, and annually coordinates the Entrepreneurship Empowerment in South Africa Program. Morris has published eleven books and over 130 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is co-editor of the Prentice-Hall Entrepreneurship Series and editor emeritus of the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship. He is a Past President of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and chaired the American Marketing Association’s Entrepreneurship and Marketing Taskforce. Morris was awarded the Edwin & Gloria Appel Prize for contributions to entrepreneurship. A former Fulbright Scholar, Morris was selected as one of the top twenty entrepreneurship professors by Fortune Small Business, and received the Leavey Award from the Freedoms Foundation for impacting private enterprise education. The Academy of Management gave him the Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award in 2014.