High honor for Professor Friederike Welter

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Friederike Welter received the Foundational Paper Award of the Entrepreneurship Division at the 85th Annual Conference of the Academy of Management (AOM) in Copenhagen. The jury awarded the prize to the first publication "Contextualizing Entrepreneurship - Conceptual Challenges and Ways Forward" of her comprehensive contextual research. In its statement, the jury explained that the IfM President has "had a lasting and positive influence on the discussion in the field of entrepreneurship for at least a decade". The Foundational Paper Award has been presented annually since 2008 for publications that "have applied a concept or theory from entrepreneurship research in a particularly meaningful way or have empirically investigated an important question in a novel way". In the past, internationally renowned entrepreneurship researchers such as Professor William B. Gartner and Professor Jérome Katz ("Properties of emerging organizations"), Professor Howard Aldrich and Professor Jennifer Jennings ("The pervasive effects of family on entrepreneurship: Toward a family embeddedness perspective") and Professor William J. Baumol ("Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive and destructive") have received the award. In her speech, Professor Friederike Welter not only highlighted the special features of contextual research, but also the areas in which she sees a need for further research. "This also includes questioning our general assumptions about what is important for entrepreneurship," she said.