William D. Bygrave

Groundbreaking innovator and entrepreneurship professor emeritus

Along with his colleague Jeff Timmons, William D. Bygrave is considered the co-founder of entrepreneurship at Babson. He was director of The Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College from 1993 to 1999. He spent the 1992–1993 academic year at INSEAD where he introduced an MBA course in Entrepreneurial Finance and led a pan-European team from eight nations that studied entrepreneurs’ attitudes toward realizing value and growing their companies. An outcome of that research was the initiative that led to the founding of EASDAQ (the European equivalent of NASDAQ). In 1999, he and Michael Hay at the London Business School started the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which examines the entrepreneurial competitiveness of nations. Bygrave founded a venture capital-backed, high-tech company, managed a division of a NYSE-listed high-tech company, co-founded a pharmaceutical database company, and was a member of the investment committee of a venture capital firm. He was the 1997 winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in the supporter category for New England and one of three finalists nationwide. He has written more than 50 papers on venture capital, entrepreneurship, nuclear physics, hospital pharmaceuticals, and philosophy of science, among other topics. Notably, in 2004, he won the Walter H. Carpenter Prize for Exceptional Contributions to Babson College.