Professor Sascha Kraus, associate professor at the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Head of the Competence Center for Entrepreneurship and Family Business, was elected Visiting Professor of International Small Business Management by the University of St. Gallen (HSG) in May 2013.
With its highly prestigious international AACSB and EQUIS accreditations, this university situated in the neighbouring canton is Europe’s seventh-best business school according to a Financial Times ranking. And the 2012 Handelsblatt rankings for business administration rates it the number one university in the German-speaking area measured by research performance. The decision to elect Professor Kraus as visiting professor was a unanimous one among the faculty (School of Management) as well as in the academic senate, which oversees the university as a whole.
As part of his visiting professorship, Professor Kraus will teach at the HSG’s Swiss Research Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (KMU-HSG), an institution with which the University of Liechtenstein has enjoyed intensive research collaboration for several years now. Since 2012, Kraus has already been serving as Editor-in-Chief of the most prestigious journal in the area of research, Zeitschrift für KMU und Entrepreneurship, which since his tenure there has been jointly published by the HSG and the University of Liechtenstein. He has also twice served as an expert contributor to the international Rencontres de St-Gall, which invites academics on the basis of their reputation and research performance.
Institute Director Professor Urs Fueglistaller had the following to say regarding Kraus’s election: “We are extremely pleased to have obtained the teaching services of such a well-qualified junior researcher in the field of entrepreneurship as part of a visiting professorship. The fact that he is placed 50th among 3,000 German-speaking business economists and 3rd in the field of entrepreneurship according to the 2012 Handelsblatt rankings demonstrates that in the future he will have a determining influence on pioneering developments in this field.”
Professor Sascha Kraus in St. Gallen (HSG)
The University of Liechtenstein also welcomes expressly this more intensive collaboration. Professor Christian Marxt, Head of the Institute for Entrepreneurship, states: “Thanks to the outstanding positions achieved by our Master’s degree programme in Entrepreneurship in both the GUESS and Schmude rankings, we have already been able to provide impressive proof that the University of Liechtenstein has developed into one of the leading lights in university entrepreneurship studies within the German-speaking world. This is not least down to the academic foundations of our taught content being laid through rigorous academic research of the sort impressively performed by Sascha Kraus. The election of my colleague Sascha Kraus as a visiting professor at the HSG further cements the collaboration with the KMU-HSG, which has been extremely successful for some time now.”
It is a collaboration from which both partners will benefit – not just in the area of joint research, but also in relation to informational as well as personal exchanges, such as within teaching or in the training of doctoral candidates.