In 2006 ERA decided to honour from time to time an outstanding personality from retail-academia, who beside his work as a researcher or university-teacher contributed to society by building bridges between theory and applied sciences or via social activities.

Prof. Barabaner is Estonian, but was born in 1933 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Leaving school in 1951 he graduated in 1956 from the Leningrad Institute of Engineering and Economics , 1961 from the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering and in 1968 from the Institute of Thermophysics and Electrophysics of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian Republic.

He started his engineering activities as a power engineer and became an internationally recognized expert and adviser for power of rural districts and power of municipal services. Among his international projects: from 1965-1968 he was engaged by the Council of Mutual Economic Aid in agriculture from Mongolia to Czechoslovakia; from 1980-1995 he was an expert of the Power Commission of the Social and Economics Committee of the United Nations. Prof. Barabaner founded in 1993 the International Ecological and Technological College (IETC) in Tallinn/Estonia – transformed in 1997 in to SIEM and in 2006 in to ECOMEN (Institute of Economics and Management). In 2008 he became additionally one of the founders of the Eurasian Economic Club of Scientists in Astana/Kazakhstan, where he was appointed Vice-President in 2010.

Born 1940 in Welwyn Garden City in the UK, Ross Davies studied in North America at Northwestern University, and completed his doctorate at the University of Reading on the structure of shopping centres, which created in him a lifelong interest in the changing nature of the retail environment and in the locational strategies of retail firms. From 1974-1984 he worked at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he established his reputation as a retail geographer.

His entrepreneurial activities could be seen in 1976 when he set up his own publishing firm, in 1979 when he persuaded Tesco and the local council for an experiment which today we call e-commerce. In 1984 he joined the University of Oxford’s Templeton College where he established the Oxford Institute of Retail Management. In 1980s he raised in the British public a debate about retail planning in the UK with the result that a whole new set of policies emerged on Government level.

In the 1990s Ross Davies extended his interests internationally. He connected Oxford with Asia, where he was well known in the boardrooms especially in South Korea and Japan. Writing about “meeting the fixer”, the UK’s Retail Week industry magazine devoted a major article to his influential style of working and his extensive network of contacts. In 1997 the EHI Retail Institute was his guest in Oxford. His European Retail Seminars became also for EHI an inspiration for today’s network of the European Retail Academy.

Although he officially retired from Templeton College in 1999 he still kept contact with Oxford as an Emeritus Fellow and he was appointed to a Visiting Chair at the University of Surrey’s School of Management. Last, but not least, Ross Davies should be honoured as a great lecturer who inspired loyalty in those with whom he worked. He opened the doors and paved the way for the careers that many of them now hold. Ross Davies passed away in 2005 but will be long remembered in retail academia.

Vladimir Ivanovich Malyshkov was born on September 6th, 1941 in the Vladimirskaya oblast (region). He studied at the Moscow Institute of the Soviet Trade and graduated in 1970 with a diploma "Science of commodities and organization of trade".

Since 1993 V.I.Malyshkov is Minister of the Moscow City Government and head of the Department of trade and services of Moscow City. From that time onwards he was responsible for the transformation of Moscow’s trade and to a certain degree also for the city-marketing. In this period Moscow gained the image of being one of the most dynamic metropolis of the world.

Prof. Malyshkov is well-known also for his macro-economic analysis of the national development as well as the sector-analysis of goods and services. He is editor in the team of the magazines “Food and Society”, “Moscow Trade”, "Russian Trade", "The Moscow Feast" of "Trading Newspaper", "Directory of the Trade Leader".

Prof. Malyshkov is president of the Moscow Academy of Business at the Government of Moscow and Vice-president of the Moscow International Business Association. He is also Doctor honour causa at the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics in Moscow, where he has a chair.

Jirí Jindra was born in Vysoké Mýto/CZ at 1934. He studied in the Trade Faculty at the University of Economics in Prague(VŠE) and graduated 1957 at the level of master.

In the same year Jirí Jindra started his work at the Research Institute of Trade.In this function he initiated in 1989 -at that time still for the Czech-Slovak-Republic- the first visits of trade-delegations to Cologne for discussions with the DHI (today EHI) Retail Institute. In 1993 Jindra meanwhile back at the university became dean of the International Faculty of VSE. In this time he promoted the transformation of the Czech retail in workshops with retailers to analyse the situation by a barometer of the commercial climate. His main subjects as an academic teacher have been Retailing and Trade Logistics. Books to be mentioned are Trade Logistics(1993) and International Retailing(2002).

Beside his academic work Jindra helped to establish the Czech retail association Svaz Obchodu and was its vice-president from 1993 to 2003. In 1995 he initiated the Czech Retail Summit, which he presided from 1995 uptill 2005. In both capacities he united retail/wholesale with the academic levels of VSE and with government officials. Last but not least he promoted the international dialogue and contributed by this a special flavour to the Prague-meetings.