Dr. Caron St. John received the Dr. Charles Townes Individual Achievement Award. This award recognizes an individual who exhibits the true spirit of innovation, excellence and leadership through hard work and a commitment to the Upstate community. Dr. Caron St. John is the founding Director of Clemson University’s Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership and also serves as Director of MBA Programs and Associate Dean of the College of Business and Behavioral Science. Dr. St. John’s many academic and administrative accomplishments have been widely recognized both by Clemson and by national leaders in her field. It is, however, her contributions to the entrepreneurial life of Upstate South Carolina that make her deserving of the Dr. Charles Townes Individual Achievement Award.

During the past eleven years, Caron St. John’s vision has inspired the founding and development of the Spiro Institute. Under her leadership, the Institute has been propelled into the ranks of the most innovative university-based programs in the country. Simply stated, Dr. St. John’s vision has been to enact a fundamental change the way that the university is engaged in the business world, and a fundamental change in the way that students are educated for the challenges they will face as entrepreneurs in highly a competitive business environment.

The key to enacting this vision has been to strategically integrate the missions of three key programs at Clemson: The Spiro Institute, our MBA programs and the most recent addition, the Renaissance Center in Greenville. Under Dr. St John’s leadership, these programs work together to take maximum advantage of real-world business experience for students, and to provide access for the area’s entrepreneurs to state-of-the business analysis. Under the direction of faculty mentors, MBA student teams work closely with area businesses providing a range of assistance, from start-up advice for new ventures to analysis for some of the area’s flagship companies. An example is the center’s market opportunity analysis for Michelin’s “Tweel” project, an effort that was reported in The New York Times.

Dr. St. John enjoys the challenges of creating new programs and seeing them through to success, and often provides inspiration and foresight that inspires her colleagues and associates. A primary example is the thought leadership she provided in the establishment of the Clemson University Renaissance Center, which opened its doors on Main Street this past spring. It was Caron St. John who first conceptualized the idea several years ago, then tirelessly promoted the vision at Clemson and to Grenville business leaders.

Dr. St. John has attained many honors, awards and other achievements in her nineteen years at Clemson. Those accomplishments, outlined on the following pages, attest to her tireless quest for excellence in educational programs, and to her dedication to the entrepreneurial community in the Upstate. Moreover, her accomplishments speak to the outstanding ways in which she has used her knowledge, skills, and abilities to help make Greenville a continuing source of economic vitality in the region.

It has often been said that good entrepreneurs know how to “connect the dots.” That is, they scan the competitive environment, determine what needs to be done, acquire the necessary resources, and inspire others to achieve results. Dr. St. John does all of that, and more. She is one of those rare, inspired leaders who also see “dots” to connect that do not yet exist, and find ways to make bring them into existence.

Professor St. John’s research focuses on the strategic, technical and operations issues within businesses. In her research with Professor Jeffrey Harrison, which has been referenced in The Economist, she investigated how diversified firms achieve synergies from business units that have similar technological and manufacturing resources. In her work with Professor Richard Pouder, she explored the effects of geographical clustering of high technology firms on competitive practices and innovation. She and Professor Pouder were invited to present their work at the Conference Board of Canada’s Technopolis Conference in September 1997. In 1999, she and co-authors Raju Balakrishnan and James Fiet received the Decision Sciences Institute’s Best Interdisciplinary Paper award for their use of neural networks in predicting the wealth effects of corporate strategy decisions.

Professor St. John has participated in grants receiving $1.5 million from the U.S. Small Business Administration, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the National Science Foundation. She has published and presented numerous articles in outlets including Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Operations Management, Human Relations, International Business Review, Academy of Management Executive, International Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management, and other journals. She has served on the editorial review boards of Production and Operations Management, Business Case Journal, and Academy of Management Executive, and has served as a reviewer for Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Management Science, and Journal of Operations Management.

With Jeffrey Harrision, she co-authored two texts, Strategic Management of Organizations and Stakeholders and Foundations in Strategic Management. She regularly teaches strategic management, operations strategy, and technology and innovation management at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels. She also participates in team-taught courses within the entrepreneurship course sequences, including a technology entrepreneurship course for science and engineering majors. She is the past recipient of the Department of Management Scholarly Achievement Award and the two-time recipient of the Outstanding MBA Faculty Award.

During her tenure as director of the Spiro Center, she developed several new curriculum initiatives in entrepreneurship, planned and implemented several outreach programs that link graduate business students and experienced business executives with inventors and entrepreneurs for assistance and mentoring, created a competitive research grants program for faculty and graduate students, and established a formal relationship with the university's Office of Technology Transfer to graduate business students in the university’s technology commercialization efforts. She has also involved the Spiro Center in several collaborations on campus and in the state that are intended to spur economic development through technology-based entrepreneurial initiatives. She is a founding board member of the Upstate Coalition for Entrepreneurial Development and of InnoVenture. She serves on the Clemson University Research Foundation Board.
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