Nobel Class for Honorary Doctor Prof. David Audretsch
The University and the Faculty of Business and Economics congratulate their honorary doctor, Prof. David Audretsch, Ph.D., on being nominated as a Citation Laureate™. Audretsch, an economist, who was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty in 2008, has been classified as "Nobel Class" by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™ for his work in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation. Vice President Professor Peter Welzel, who at the time initiated the awarding of an honorary doctorate to Professor David Audretsch on behalf of the Institute of Economics, is delighted, but not surprised: “We always knew that with David Audretsch we were honouring a personality who researches highly relevant topics such as entrepreneurship and innovation with worldwide recognition and influence at the highest academic level. With his research programme, David Audretsch also stands for a constituent element of our Faculty of Business and Economics: the constructive cooperation and intensive interlinking of business management and economics." Professor David Audretsch (born 1954) researches and teaches at the Institute for Development Strategies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has had very close ties with Germany and the University of Augsburg for decades. Professor Erik Lehmann, a longstanding co-author and cooperation partner, makes the following comment: “David Audretsch has spent significant stages of his academic career in Germany. This includes his work at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB) as well as his work as director of the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena. The promotion of young academics is and has always been a special concern of his. I myself benefited from this during my research periods spent at Indiana University, as did our faculty colleague Professor Susanne Warning and generations of young academics in my department.” Professor David Audretsch strengthens research and teaching at the Faculty of Business and Economics through regular stays in Augsburg. Numerous books, such as most recently “The Seven Secrets of Germany”, and articles, have been co-authored with Professor Erik Lehmann. The students benefit in particular from the “Bavarian-Lombardian Summer School”, which Professor Erik Lehmann, Professor David Audretsch and colleagues launched in Bergamo 10 years ago. Together with fellow students from Augsburg and Bergamo, over 20 students from Indiana University take part in an intensive three-week programme in Augsburg and Bergamo and work on projects in international teams. Congratulations to Professor David Audretsch on this new award! He was and is a role model for business and economics in academia. Even if counting publications and citations may seem rather boring and superfluous to him, his inclusion in the "Nobel Class" impressively demonstrates that his academic work and his diverse activities have never conflicted with one another, but rather portray a picture of an academic who is convinced of his vocation and makes an impression worldwide.
The ISI™ is best known for collecting the publication and citation data from the Web of Science™. Every year since 2002, the institute has identified the most influential researchers in the disciplines of medicine, physics, chemistrychemistry, and economics from the more than 52 million articles that have been indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) since 1970. Only a small group of around 6,500 researchers (less than 0.1% of all authors in the WoS) whose contributions are cited at least 2,000 times are taken into accountconsidered. From this group, the award winners whose research publications are among the most frequently cited and particularly influential are selected each year. The importance of this award is reflected in the fact that 59 Nobel Prize winners have emerged from this “Nobel Class” group since 2002.