Jon Eckhardt

Jon is a scholar-practitioner. He is the Pyle Bascom Professor in Business Leadership at the Wisconsin School of Business, a Discovery Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Editor and Chief at the Entrepreneur and Innovation Exchange. At the University of Wisconsin, professor Eckhardt is the cofounder of the Entrepreneurship Lab, and he teaches in the undergraduate, MBA, Ph.D. and executive education programs. His research projects involve the study of various aspects of entrepreneurship, including firm formation, venture finance, initial public offerings, and university-driven entrepreneurship. Jon is also a cofounder of gener8tor, a top ranked business accelerator based in Wisconsin which has helped to build over 788 companies that have gone on to raise over $400 million dollars in venture funding and employ over 7,000 people. He has won several awards for teaching and researching entrepreneurship, including a national fellowship from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. He was awarded a Schulze Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship by the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation in 2015 which was renewed in 2019. Jon became interested in diversity science after collecting data that indicated that female undergraduate and graduate students were much less likely to be involved in entrepreneurship than male students.

Research areas: Entrepreneurship