Regents Professor wins prestigious global award for entrepreneurship research

The concept of innovation is a big part of the ethos at Arizona State University. But innovation does not just happen — it is guided by structures, policies and incentives, mentorship, and all the work that goes into building an institution's culture.

The research to identify the practices that inspire innovation, and the interdependent entrepreneurship associated with new ideas and technology, is the specialty of ASU’s Donald Siegel, Regents and Foundation Professor of public policy and management in the School of Public Affairs and co-executive director of the Global Center for Technology Transfer.

On Monday, Siegel was announced as the co-winner of the 2026 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, the field’s most prestigious award. The award is given to a researcher who has “produced scientific work of outstanding quality and importance” that significantly contributes to the field of entrepreneurship and small business development.

Siegel will share the award with longtime collaborator Albert Link, distinguished professor emeritus of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Through their research and numerous publications, the two have “paved the way for a new generation of scholars” in the field of entrepreneurship, wrote the prize committee in the award announcement.

“By showing and explaining how entrepreneurs are connected with the institutions, organizations and geographies around them, they have inspired new, increasingly nuanced and research-based approaches to public policy, aimed at fostering innovative entrepreneurship,” according to the statement.

Siegel said he sees the award, and the lecture he will give on June 1 at the ceremony in Stockholm, as opportunities to promote academic entrepreneurship and technology transfer as critical areas of research.

“We want universities to be effective in transferring technologies from the lab to the marketplace, since this will accelerate commercialization and use of federally funded research. More importantly, technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship have enormous potential to improve our standard of living, enhance the quality of our lives, and stimulate economic development and job creation.”

Siegel’s research has primarily focused on the managerial and public policy implications of innovation, technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship, including the role of policy in accelerating — or, conversely, stifling — technology transfer and the commercialization of new inventions and discoveries.

His early work focused on assessing the connection between innovation and productivity, developing more precise estimates of both the private and social returns to federally funded research, including basic research. These papers were published in top economics journals, including the American Economic Review and the Review of Economics and Statistics.

Siegel said he has made two significant intellectual contributions to the fields of technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship. The first is developing methods to evaluate and explain relative performance in technology transfer, which he applied in numerous studies based on data from the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden. This body of work includes comprehensive studies of the performance of technology transfer offices, incubators, accelerators and science parks.

Other research — conducted jointly with David Waldman, Dean's Council Distinguished Professor of Management in the W. P. Carey School of Business and co-executive director of the Global Center for Technology Transfer, and numerous doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers — shows that organizational and human resource management practices influence the speed and effectiveness of technology transfer at universities and federal labs. The research, funded by the Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation, has resulted in numerous papers in top management journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, and Research Policy.

The research on management practices and social impact of technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is ongoing, Siegel noted, and he believes that ASU, an institution “all about both innovation and entrepreneurship,” is the perfect place to do it. He plans to continue mapping the field of academic entrepreneurship because expediting technology transfer maximizes the social returns on federally funded research, he said. He is also the principal investigator (on the ASU side) of a $1.5 million project funded by the Arizona Board of Regents exploring technology transfer in the life sciences and biomedicine in Arizona. 

As co-winner of the award, Siegel will receive half of the €100,000 award, which he plans to funnel through the university into research, including funds for student support to help foster the next generation of academic entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship researchers.