Jerome (Jerry) Katz is the Coleman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship at the John Cook School of Business, Saint Louis University. He is also the founder and director of Saint Louis University's Billiken Angels Network. Previously he held the Mary Louise Murray Endowed Professorship in Management at the Cook School, and prior to his coming to Saint Louis University he was an Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Jerry holds a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, and other graduate degrees from Harvard and the University of Memphis.

Throughout the years he has worked in or advised his family's businesses including stints working in the family's discount department store, sporting goods wholesaling, pharmacies, auto parts jobbing, and secondary market wholesaling of frozen food. As a professor he has served as adviser to nearly 400 business plans developed by students at Saint Louis University, whose Entrepreneurship Program (which Jerry leads) has been nationally ranked every year since 1994. Earlier in his career he served as Associate Director for the Missouri State Small Business Development Centers. He has taught, trained or consulted on entrepreneurship education and business development services in Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Singapore, Israel, Croatia, and the West Bank. His consulting firm, J. A. Katz & Associates, has a client list including the Soros, GE, Kauffman and Coleman Foundations as well as the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, Sweden's Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute, the International Labor Organization (ILO), RISEbusiness, the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Science Foundation, and the Committee of 200.

Inc. Magazine identified him in its 1995 and 2001 issues as one of the world's top small business researchers. He has done research and theorizing on career models of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship/ small business education, as well as collaborating with others on topics as diverse as opportunity recognition (with Connie Marie Gaglio), the properties of emerging organizations (with William Gartner), Internet-based businesses (with Scott Safranski), and international entrepreneurship (with Sumit Kundu).

Jerry edits two book series, Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth (with Tom Lumpkin, published by Emerald) and Entrepreneurship and the Management of Growing Enterprises (published by Sage) and has edited over a dozen special issues on small business, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship education for journals such as Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, and Simulation & Gaming. He has been a member of the founding editorial boards of Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, Academy of Management Learning & Education, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, and the International Journal of Technoentrepreneurship. He has also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Small Business Management, and the Academy of Management Executive.

Following his parents' tradition of civic entrepreneurship, Jerry has served the profession working his way up to become Senior Vice President for Research and Publications of the International Council for Small Business and eventually Chair of the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. He was also one of only a handful of small business or entrepreneurship faculty to be elected to Academy-wide office, serving as a Governor of the Academy of Management from 2000–2003. He developed eWeb, one of the first Web sites dedicated to entrepreneurship education, and he was a winner of top-tier ratings from Anbar, Argus, LookSmart, and Studyweb. Other innovations in small business education in which he was involved included co-developing the Gateways to Entrepreneurship Research Conference, as well as the first adjunct teacher's guide and first center director consortia in the field.

For these efforts, he has been a recipient of more than a dozen major professional awards including Babson's Appel Prize for Entrepreneurship Education, the Family Firm Institute's LeVan Award for Interdisciplinary Contributions to Family Business, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Academy of Management's Entrepreneurship Division, as well as Mentorship Awards from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management, and from Saint Louis University's Graduate Student Association. In 2004 he was elected the fiftieth fellow of the U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and in 2005 he received Saint Louis University's John Cook School of Business Alumni Award for Outstanding Educator.

Richard P. Green II, Texas A&M University - San Antonio

Richard Green is a successful serial entrepreneur who has started, built, and sold several businesses across an extraordinarily wide range of industries. His first business was an electrical sign repair company, which he began while an undergraduate student. Since then, Richard has started two other sign companies, a structural steel business, a manufacturer of stainless steel products, a real estate brokerage, a tax return preparation service, and a bed-and-breakfast. During the "go-go banking" years, he held controlling interest in a state-chartered bank. More recently, Richard, with his long-time associate Richard Carter, conducted the start-up of Lineas Aereas Azteca (Azteca Airlines), served as co-owner with his spouse of a San Antonio bed-and-breakfast, the Adams House, and served as chief financial officer for a high-tech start-up, Celldyne Biopharma LLC. As a corporate entrepreneur, Richard has worked on expansion plans for companies as diverse as the Mexican airline Aerolineas Internationales, Minneapolis based Land O'Lakes, Inc., and the Venezuelan dairy, Criozuca, S.A.

Richard brings a similarly diverse set of skills to ESB, ranging from a pilot's license (he was a professional pilot, instructor, and check airman for TWA) to a CPA. A late-life Ph.D. (from Saint Louis University), he has been an assistant and associate professor of accounting at the University of the Incarnate Word and Webster University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Accounting at Texas A&M University—San Antonio. His academic achievements are similarly impressive, with papers in the proceedings of NACRA, American Accounting Association Midwest, the American Association for Accounting and Finance, and the International Council for Small Business, as well as journals such as the Atlantic Economic Journal and Simulation & Gaming. Richard also authored more than three dozen articles in popular magazines on topics ranging from personal computers to financial decision making. Richard is co-developer (with Jerry) of the measures for financial sophistication in the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, and is senior author of Investigating Entrepreneurial Opportunities: A Practical Guide for Due Diligence (Sage). He has received research grants from Pharmacia Corporation and the Kauffman Foundation.

Always active in professional and civic roles, Richard's contributions have ranged from serving as chair of the Airline Pilots Association's grievance committee to serving on the City of San Antonio's Air Transportation Advisory Committee. He is a member of the American Accounting Association, Academy of Management, United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, North American Case Writers' Association, and the World Association for Case Method Research and Application.