(posted on behalf of @Paul Sanchez Ruiz)
Each year, the Entrepreneurship Practice Award recognizes individuals whose work has meaningfully shaped the lived practice of entrepreneurship. The award honors visible impact. However, it also raises a deeper question: What does it mean for scholarship and practice to shape one another?
As the Practitioner–Scholars Committee reflects on the future of this award, we are widening the horizon beyond recognition toward co-creation. Rather than viewing practice as an outcome of research, or research as a retrospective analysis of practice, we are thinking about the award as a focal point for co-creation between the two communities.
The award’s three categories reflect these value-creating processes.
Contribution to Scholarly Practice recognizes work that shapes entrepreneurial action, policy debates, and public discourse. Here, co-creation occurs when scholarship enters the interpretive space of practitioners, shaping how they frame problems and evaluate realities, and when practice, in turn, refines the questions scholars ask.
Contribution to Field Experience highlights educational initiatives that place theory in direct contact with entrepreneurial action. Classrooms, accelerators, and applied programs become settings where stakeholders test assumptions together. Co-creation unfolds through interaction, debate, experimentation, and shared learning.
Contribution to Community acknowledges responsible leadership that strengthens entrepreneurial capacity within a defined ecosystem. Entrepreneurship is situated in place. When practitioners and scholars engage with communities, knowledge develops relationally. It reflects lived constraint, evolving norms, and shared responsibility.
Viewed through this lens, recognition is not simply visibility. It surfaces the relational processes through which entrepreneurial practice generates knowledge and scholarly excitement. It draws attention to the human judgments and conditions that shape value creation long before outcomes are measurable.
As the Practitioner–Scholars Committee looks ahead, we are beginning to create space for conversations around these dimensions—conversations that bring practitioners and scholars into dialogue about how entrepreneurial understanding and debates take form in real contexts. More details will follow.
Co-creation does not begin with programs. It begins with recognizing that scholarship and practice are mutual stakeholders in the development of the field itself.