POTSDAM—Clarkson’s Reh Family Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurial Leadership, Christian Felzensztein won the University of San Diego Best Paper Award on Social Impact at the Business Association of Latin American Studies hosted by INCAE Business School in Costa Rica.

The study titled ‘Informal Entrepreneurship under poverty: contrasting family support in sustainable eco-tourism” was co-authored with colleagues from Dalhousie University in Canada and the Autonomous University of Yucatán in Mexico and explores the impact of family dynamics on informal, necessity driven entrepreneurship in underexplored regions of Latin America and the Caribbean. It also advances and informs public policies tailored to address the challenges of informal entrepreneurship in regional contexts that are characterized by poverty.

“We are expanding this research from the Western Hemisphere to Africa, where we have partners at research institutions understanding what are the factors that local communities and small family firms need for improving their livelihood through entrepreneurship. This is an important topic in the United Nations policy agenda and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals for reducing poverty globally. And this shows how Clarkson University is positively impacting diverse industry sectors and countries conducting world-class research with social impact,”professor Felzensztein said.

Felzensztein’s impactful research agenda includes the study of startups’ scaling-up strategies, marketing strategies for start-up growth, and technology adaptation strategies for new ventures in regional industry clusters. This is in addition to new international research projects on ethical AI governance for sustainable innovation in start-ups.

Felzensztein holds a PhD and a M.Sc. in entrepreneurship and international marketing from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland UK; Executive Education from Harvard Business School, the Weitz Center for Sustainable Studies in Rehovot, Israel, the University of Oxford in the UK, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT.