Today during the second #emmatalk, the best paper award was announced by Ulrike Röhn, President of emma. From the 31 full papers that were eligible for the 2020 best paper award, the paper that is selected as the winner is:
Markets, lower echelons and owners as brokers of coalitional attention
authored by Mathilde Sanders-van Balkom, Hans van Oosterhout and Vareska van de Vrande from the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Their study investigates how technological disruption in a two-sided market environment changes the dominant coalition in a firm. For this purpose, a longitudinal process study of a Dutch newspaper publisher’s response to internet disruption was conducted. Findings indicate that non-profit and non-dedicated financial investor owners delay the coalitional change process, while an engaged (CEO majority) strategic investor owner with industry expertise and complementary assets accelerates it. Their main contribution is that they find that diverging types of ownership lead to diverging outcomes in the process of coalitional change. They propose that upper echelons can be sidelined by lower echelons that form a dominant coalition with non-profit owners and that dominant coalitions are not entirely broken until they lose both their financial (market) and political (ownership) power base. The managerial contribution is that they illustrate how ownership may be a crucial element of an innovation strategy.
The papers have undergone blind reviews by five different scholars. Comments from the reviewer report include:
“It is a cool idea, well entrenched in the literature, lower echelons are great. Interesting and full of variety data and interesting conclusions theoretically and empirically sound”
“Strong conceptualization. Impressive data collection”
“Good theoretical anchoring, theoretically driven RQ, well conducted study”
About the authors:
Mathilde Sanders is a political scientist, who started her career as a newspaper journalist and was a lecturer and researcher at the Journalism School of the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht in The Netherlands. She is now a PhD candidate in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Her research interests lie in the field of diverging ownership types, institutional logics, categories and coalitions in (news media) organizations.
Hans van Oosterhout is a professor of Corporate Governance and Responsibility at the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). His research is in comparative corporate governance, involving both comparisons between different national corporate governance systems, and comparisons between different forms of enterprise organization.
Vareska van de Vrande is Professor of Collaborative Innovation and Business Venturing at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Vareska joined RSM in 2007 after completing a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her expertise focuses on the areas of corporate venturing and collaborative innovation, including external technology sourcing, corporate venture capital investments, strategic alliances, and corporate-startup collaboration. Other research interests include (corporate) entrepreneurship, patents, and venture capital.