When Steven Klepper opens his email to find that he has won the 2011 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, he assumes that one of his colleagues is playing a practical joke. He calls his wife over, and they reread the email together, slowly realizing that the award—both the prestigious title and the €100,000 ($136,000) prize—is real.
The path to this unexpected moment has a surprising background. Klepper never intended to become a professor. In high school, his career aspirations leaned toward finance, business, or law. During his college years, though, amid the turbulent Vietnam War era, the economics major got caught up in the spirit of revolt and decided to go against the grain, opting to defer the stability of a financially lucrative job for academia.
Yet, even after accepting a professorship at SUNY Buffalo, Klepper wasn't sure he had made the right career choice. There was still time to become a basketball referee. "That was my fallback position," he laughs. But after joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon in 1980, he says, "things really clicked," both in research opportunities and in teaching what he describes as a "dedicated" student body. The economics and social science professor's students seem to feel the same way, as they have coined his introductory economics course: "Kleppenomics."
Now Klepper's achievements on the research front—including his exploration of technological innovation across developing industries—have been recognized on an international scale. He was recently presented with the coveted award at a ceremony in Sweden.
—Olivia O'Connor (A'13)
