Michaël Bikard of MIT Sloan School of Management was awarded for his dissertation idea "Essays on Entrepreneurship and the Commercialization of University Technology".  Bikard, who is French, comes from an international background, having lived in England, Germany, Austria, and Israel before coming to the US. His idea is to observe and understand how the environment shapes the economic impact of new technologies stemming from universities. He describes, “I am specifically interested in the role of entrepreneurs in this process: technologies emerging in ‘entrepreneur-rich’ environments might have a larger economic impact.” Bikard has been working on a joint paper with MIT Associate Professor Fiona Murray that explores the pros and cons of collaboration in the context of innovation. He is also working with MIT Professor Scott Stern on a review of the book "The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times" by Baumol, Landes and Mokyr, due to be published in the Journal of Economic Literature in March 2011.

Jonathan Goldberg, a PhD candidate in MIT Department of Economics, was awarded for his dissertation idea "Entrepreneurial Investment and Interest Rates". Goldberg's working papers can be read online here: http://econ-www.mit.edu/grad/jegold/research

With an asset base of approximately $2 billion, the Kauffman Foundation is the world’s largest foundation devoted strictly to entrepreneurship. Their vision is to “foster a society of economically independent individuals who are engaged citizens, contributing to the improvement of their communities.”  A full list of the 2011 Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship Program recipeints can be found at: http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/kauffman-foundation-honors-promising-scholars-for-ground-breaking-research-in-entrepreneurship.aspx