Professor Michael Frese of Asia School of Business wins the prestigious IPA Path to Scale Award
As part of the team that published a study titled “Teaching Personal Initiative Beats Traditional Training in Boosting Small Business in West Africa”, Professor of Management at Asia Business School – Professor Michael Frese received the prestigious Path to Scale Award for High Potential Innovations in SME Development. Professor Frese and his team were presented their award on November 15, 2019 at the IPA SME Program’s 10th Working Group Meeting.
Organized by Innovations for Poverty Action – a research and policy non-profit that discovers and promotes effective solutions to global poverty problems, the Path to Scale Award recognizes innovative ideas from around the world that are proven to be effective at addressing key constraints faced by entrepreneurs and SMEs in developing countries.
Professor Frese’s research, which was conducted in Togo, West Africa, found that training that was focused on personal initiative skills that developed a proactive mindset and drove entrepreneurial behavior was far more successful than traditional business training aimed at increasing sales and profits. The research team tracked outcomes of targeted groups over two years and showed that personal initiative training increased profits by 30%, compared with just 11% for traditional training.
The USD10,000 prize money from the Path to Scale award will be used to continue the study with the view of successfully replicating the initiative in other parts of the world. This latest research is just one of many widely recognized works of Professor Frese. He has authored approximately 190 articles for various journals, written over 200 book chapters and co-authored more than 30 books in the areas of Management, Organizational Behavior and Entrepreneurship.
His academic work has resulted in him being among the most-cited management scholars in Asia-Pacific and Germany, and globally, among the top organizational behavior and entrepreneurship researchers. Watch a Virtual Class by Professor Frese on the subject of Understanding the Psychology of Crisis.
For more information, please contact:
Pek Ee Siew
Director of Marketing
Asia School of Business
E: eesiew.pek@asb.edu.my
About Asia School of Business
Asia School of Business (ASB) was established in 2015 by Bank Negara Malaysia in collaboration with MIT Sloan School of Management to be a premier global business school, a knowledge and learning hub infused with regional expertise, insights and perspectives of Asia and the emerging economies. ASB is committed to develop transformative and principled leaders who will contribute towards advancing the emerging world.
Still under construction, ASB’s sprawling new, state-of-the-art campus in Kuala Lumpur is set to be ready in June 2020.