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 2026 Recipient:
By Charles E. Eesley & Edward B. Roberts
Eesley, C. E., & Roberts, E. B. (2012). Are you experienced or are you talented?: When does innate talent versus experience explain entrepreneurial performance?. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 6(3), 207-219.
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 the Recipients:
Chuck Eesley is a Professor of Management Science & Engineering at the Stanford University School of Engineering and Co-Director for International Entrepreneurship at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP). His research examines how institutional environments, industrial policy, and platform design shape entrepreneurial outcomes, with active work on AI-mediated entrepreneurial cognition, the algorithmic financing of online misinformation, U.S.–China export controls and venture capital, the Inflation Reduction Act and cleantech entrepreneurship, and the Stanford alumni economic impact study with William F. Miller. He is a W.M. Keck Foundation Faculty Scholar and a faculty affiliate at Stanford HAI and the Stanford Center for AI Safety. He holds a PhD from MIT Sloan and a BS in Neuroscience from Duke.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eesley
Edward Roberts was the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology, and the founder and chair of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. He was an expert in advanced technology management and entrepreneurship, a serial high-tech entrepreneur, and a leading angel investor.