University of Notre Dame business professor Dean Shepherd was named the winner of the 2025 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.
Sheperd serves as the Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
“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.
The awards committee consisted of six members who hold or have held a 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 was launched in 1996. It bestows “The Hand of God” statuette and €100,000. Shepherd will receive the award during a June 2 ceremony in Stockholm.
Shepherd joined Notre Dame in 2017. He 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. Shepherd is a fellow of the Academy of Management. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from Jonkoping University, Technical University of Munich, Lulea University of Technology and Hanken School of Economics.
Shepherd’s awards include the Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award, the Mentor Award and the Foundational Paper Award. He has authored over 20 books and 180 publications in top management and entrepreneurship journals with over 90,000 Google citations.