This award came as a surprise: Niels Wendt (got his Ph.D. earlier this year and was a member of the Economic Geography team until summer 2024) and Rolf Sternberg received the Best Paper Award at this year's 28th McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference. The paper entitled “A comparison of founders in Germany with and without a migration background: entrepreneurial attitudes and innovativeness” is dedicated to the research question of whether statistically significant differences exist in Germany between people with and without a migration background with regard to the determinants of start-up propensity, frequency and innovativeness. Using GEM data and multivariate methods, the authors show that such differences do indeed exist and that they are stronger for the first than for the second generation of people with a migration background. This year's conference was organized in Lappeenranta, Finland, by the Lappeenranta University of Technology and the local LUT Business School. The discussant of this paper was none other than David Audretsch (Indiana University/USA), one of the most renowned and cited entrepreneurship researchers in the world.
