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Excellent research awarded

Jürgen Hauschildt Award 2022 goes to Steffen Runge, Matthias Schulz and Christian Schwens.

Montage von Dr. Matthias Schulz, Profesor Christian Schwens und Steffen Runge vor einem Hintergrund im WiSo-Foyer mit der Verleihungsurkunde zum Jürgen Hausschildt-Award.

Dr Schultz, Professor Schwens and Steffen Runge

"The Award is given for empirical work on innovation management of excellent scientific quality that addresses a relevant problem." The first sentence of the call for submissions for the Jürgen Hauschildt Prize of the Scientific Commission for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the VHB formulates a high standard. We are therefore all the more pleased to congratulate Steffen Runge, Matthias Schulz and Christian Schwens from the Professorship in Entrepreneurship and Management on winning this year's Jürgen Hauschildt Prize. With this prize, the VHB (German Academic Association for Business Research [Verband der Hochschullehrerinnen und Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaft]) annually promotes publications on empirically based innovation management.

Steffen Runge, Matthias Schulz and Christian Schwens have jointly investigated how technological, geographical, and product market overlaps between a firm and its alliance partner influences the firm's invention performance by shaping the learning and competitive tension in a research and development alliance. For the study, they tested their hypotheses using a dataset of 215 R&D alliances formed by 94 US pharmaceutical companies over a 17-year period.

According to the jury of the Jürgen Hauschildt Award, the study entitled "The invention performance implications of coopetition: How technological, geographical, and product market overlaps shape learning and competitive tension in R&D alliances" is theoretically sound, has an advanced empirical methodology and contributes to the ongoing debate in innovation research. Moreover, it contains clear implications for business practice.

In summary, according to the study, when forming R&D alliances, companies should focus on partner firms with technological overlaps. "Technological overlaps tend to enhance the learning capacity of the firm, as the firm and its partner increasingly share a common framework, which facilitates inter-firm learning and knowledge transfer. Such a shared framework enables the firm to recognise, absorb and apply valuable knowledge from its partner, which ultimately increases its performance," says Prof. Dr Schwens.