Bill Bygrave, M.A, D.Phil. (Oxford University), MBA (Northeastern University), D.B.A. (Boston University), honorary doctorate (University of Ghent), honorary doctorate (Glasgow Caledonian University), is the Frederic C. Hamilton Professor for Free Enterprise at Babson College, Special Professor at the University of Nottingham, and Visiting Professor at the London Business School.
As an academic, he teaches and researches entrepreneurship, especially financing of start-up and growing ventures. He spent the 1992-1993 academic year at INSEAD where he introduced an MBA course Entrepreneurial Finance and led a pan-European team from eight nations that studied entrepreneurs' attitudes toward realizing value and harvesting their companies. One of the outcomes of that research was the initiative that led to the founding of EASDAQ (the European equivalent of NASDAQ).
He and Jeffry Timmons are the authors of Venture Capital at the Crossroads (Harvard Business School Press, 1992), which examines the venture capital industry and its role in the economy. He has written more than 50 papers on topics that include venture capital, entrepreneurship, nuclear physics, hospital pharmaceuticals, and philosophy of science. He is co-editor of The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship Case Studies (Wiley & Sons, 1997); editor of The Portable MBA of Entrepreneurship 2nd edition (Wiley, 1997); co-editor of the Venture Capital Handbook (Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 1999); co-editor of Realizing Investment Value (Pitman/Financial Times, November 1993); co-editor of Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research which is published annually; and an editor of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. He has served on the review boards of three entrepreneurship journals. He was the director of the Annual Babson College-Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurship Research Conference in 1994 and 1995. Translations of his books have been published in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Bahasa Indonesia.
As a practitioner, he founded a Route 128 venture capital-backed high-tech company, managed a division of a NYSE-listed high-tech company, co-founded a pharmaceutical data base company, and was a member of the investment committee of a venture capital firm. His company won an IR100 award for introducing one of the 100 most significant new technical products in the U.S.A. in 1977. He was the 1997 winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in the supporter category for New England, and one of the three finalists in this category nationwide.