AWARD CRITERIA
In 2014, seven years after the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal was launched, an annual best paper award was established by co-sponsors Wiley and the Strategic Management Society to honor substantial work published in the SEJ. As with the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize, the award is for a paper published five or more years prior to the recognition. This delay allows time for the impact of papers to be assessed in terms of citations and influence of the paper on teaching, research, and/or practice. Once eligible, a paper remains eligible until selected as the best paper. Continued eligibility allows recognition to be made for those insights and findings that sometimes occur before their time and only become widely recognized as significant after other work is published.
The award committee consists of the Editorial Board of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.
Authors of the winning paper receive a monetary award of US$ 5,000. The award is given and the authors are recognized at the SMS Annual Conference.
The SEJ Best Paper Prize 2025 Recipient:
By Henry Sauermann
Sauermann, H. (2017). Fire in the belly? employee motives and innovative performance in start‐ups versus established firms. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 12(4), 423–454. https://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1267
This paper offers exceptional insights into how employee motives influence innovative performance in startups versus established firms. Literature has highlighted the importance of founders in entrepreneurial firms but has paid scant attention to the impact of employees or “joiners.” Analyzing a rich dataset of over 10,000 U.S. scientists and engineers, this work highlights the unique motivational profile of start-up employees—their lower emphasis on salary and job security, and greater preference for independence and responsibility—compared to counterparts in established firms. The paper empirically establishes that start-up employees have more patent applications than employees in small and large established firms, and that this difference is partially mediated by employee motives, especially their greater willingness to bear risk. This work challenges us to broaden our conception of human capital beyond skills and experience, and underlines the impact of employee motives in driving innovation. It brilliantly bridges entrepreneurship, innovation, and human capital literatures while offering practical implications for founders and managers seeking to attract entrepreneurially minded talent and policymakers interested in fostering innovation ecosystems. Its contribution will stimulate further conversation at the intersection of entrepreneurship, human capital, and innovation.
About Henry:
Henry Sauermann is Professor of Strategy and ESMT Chair in Entrepreneurship at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. One stream of his research examines the role of human capital in science and innovation. Among others, he studies how scientists’ motives and interests shape their research activities as well as choices to enter careers in academia, established firms, or as startup “joiners”. A second stream studies how crowd science approaches allow organizations to scale scientific research, broaden participation, and increase the impact of science on society. This work has also led Sauermann to explore the AI-based automation of research tasks, augmentation of human researchers, and algorithmic management of large organizations. Sauermann has published in journals such as Management Science, Organization Science, PNAS, Research Policy, Science, and the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. Prior to joining ESMT, Sauermann was an Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and he received his PhD from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.