Jerome (Jerry) Katz is the Robert H. Brockhaus Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business, Saint Louis University. Prior to his coming to Saint Louis University he was an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Jerry holds a PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, and other graduate degrees from Harvard and the University of Memphis.
Throughout the years, he has worked in or advised his family’s businesses including stints working in the family’s discount department store, sporting goods wholesaling, pharmacies, auto parts jobbing, and secondary-market wholesaling of frozen food. As a professor he has served as adviser to over 500 business plans developed by students at Saint Louis University, whose Entrepreneurship Program (which Jerry leads) has been nationally ranked every year since 1994.
He was also the founder and director of Saint Louis University’s Billiken Angels Network, which was ranked by the HALO Report as one of the top angel groups in the United States. Earlier in his career he served as associate director for the Missouri State Small Business Development Centers. He has taught, trained, or consulted on entrepreneurship education and business development services in Germany, Spain, China, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Singapore, Israel, Croatia, and the West Bank. His consulting firm, J. A. Katz & Associates, has a client list including the Soros, GE, Kauffman and Coleman Foundations, as well as the Korea Entrepreneurship Foundation, the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, Sweden’s Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute, the International Labor Organization (ILO), RISEbusiness, the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Science Foundation, and the Committee of 200.
As a researcher, Jerry has done work on entrepreneurship, organizational emergence, opportunity analysis, and the discipline and infrastructure of entrepreneurship education. Today nine of his papers can be found in 11 different compendia of “classic” works in entrepreneurship and small business. He was a corecipient of the 2013 Foundational Paper Award of the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, and Google Scholar reports Jerry’s papers have been cited over 13,000 times. Jerry founded and edited two book series, Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth (published by Emerald) and Entrepreneurship and the Management of Growing Enterprises (published by Sage) and has edited over a dozen special issues. He sits on the editorial boards of nine journals: Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Journal of International Entrepreneurship, International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, International Journal of Technoentrepreneurship, Experiential Entrepreneurship Exercises Journal, USASBE Annals of Entrepreneurship Education, Journal of Entrepreneurship Education, and Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy.
Following his parents’ tradition of civic entrepreneurship, Jerry has served in a variety of roles including a governor of the Academy of Management, chair of the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, and senior vice president for research and publications of the International Council for Small Business. He serves on a number of local, national, and international boards promoting entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education and training for students and the general public. For these efforts, he has been a recipient of more than a dozen major professional awards including Babson’s Appel Prize for Entrepreneurship Education, the Family Firm Institute’s LeVan Award for Interdisciplinary Contributions to Family Business, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Academy of Management’s Entrepreneurship Division, as well as Mentorship Awards from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, and from Saint Louis University’s Graduate Student Association, and Saint Louis University’s Chaifetz School of Business Alumni Award for Outstanding Educator. He was elected the fiftieth fellow of the U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
