Zoltan Acs

Zoltan J. Acs Ph.D is Professor of Management at The London School of Economics (LSE) and University Professor and Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy (CEPP) at George Mason University. He is also a visiting professor at Imperial College Business School in London and affiliated with the University of Pecs in Hungary and a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is coeditor and founder of Small Business Economics a leading academic journal.

Previously he was a Research Scholar at the Entrepreneurship Growth and Public Policy Group at the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena, Germany. He has also served as Research Fellow at the U. S. Bureau of the Census, Chief Economist at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), Associate Director of the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) at the University of Maryland, Research Fellow at the Science Center Berlin, Research Associate at the Institute on Western Europe at Columbia University and Scholar-in-Residence at the Kauffman Foundation.

For 30 years Dr. Acs has been a leading advocate of the importance of entrepreneurship for economic development. His research covers the intersection of innovation, technical change, regional economics, institutions, growth and entrepreneurship. He received the 2001 International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research, on behalf of The Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development. His research has appeared in the most important journals publishing more than 200 articles and 30 books. His most recent book Why Philanthropy Matters: How the wealthy give, and what it means for our economic well-being, 2013 (Princeton University Press) was finalist for the Academy of Management George R. Baker Prize for the best book in management in 2014.

He is the founder of The GEDI Institute and along with Dr. Laszlo Szerb the founder of the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) that is the first tool to track entrepreneurship and economic development in the global Economy.