Martin Pit, Dries Faems, Isabel Estrada and Floor Rink win European Academy of Management ‘Strategic Management’ Best Paper Award

Martin Pit, Dries Faems, Isabel Estrada and Floor Rink have won the Best Paper Award in the Strategic Management interest group at the annual conference of the European Academy of Management (EURAM) held in June in Winterthur. Their paper titled ‘Collaboration Theater: Connecting Cooperation, Absence of Value Creation and Alliance Expansion’ was found to be the best by EURAM’s Strategic Interest Group (SIG) in Strategic Management.

The paper is based on an inductive case study that is part of Martin Pit’s PhD dissertation. Pit is a PhD candidate at FEB’s department of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior, where Floor Rink is a full professor. Isabel Estrada is associate professor at the department of Innovation Management & Strategy, and Dries Faems is full professor at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management. In their paper, the authors study an unexpected connection between cooperation and an absence of value creation in a strategic alliance context, and highlight tensions between project- and alliance-level conditions that allow this connection to occur. In doing so, they point to the risks of ‘collaboration theater’, a situation where partners conduct extensive collaboration initiatives without producing tangible outcomes.

The paper was valued by EURAM’s Strategic Management SIG for its’ contribution to enriching theoretical understanding of collaboration dynamics in alliances and hereby contributing to increasing scholarly and managerial understanding regarding organization’s competitive advantage, long-term performance and survival. EURAM’s Strategic Management SIG is committed to bringing together scholars from all around the world to engage in the development and exchange of high-quality research ideas with the potential to fertilize and drive the future directions of scholarly and practitioner strategic thinking alike.