Every year, the SMS Awards & Honors Committee recognizes individuals and research that have made significant contributions to the field of strategic management and advance its study and practice. With these awards, SMS honors emerging scholars in the field, scholars who have demonstrated leadership and innovation, articles that have notable impacts in the field, authors of outstanding academic work, and more.
We are delighted to present the 2026 SMS Award recipients!
CK Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice
This award recognizes excellence in the application of theory and research in practice.
Professor Annabelle Gawer is a world-leading scholar in digital platforms and ecosystem strategy. She holds the Chair in Digital Economy at the University of Surrey, where she directs the Centre of Digital Economy. Her research has highlighted on how the digital age has given rise to new dominant organisational forms and new kinds of competition, innovation, and governance. The author of four books and over 60 articles, she has been among the most cited female academics in business and economics, receiving multiple Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher awards. She holds a PhD in Management from MIT Sloan and a MSc in Industrial Engineering from Stanford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a visiting professor at IMD. She has advised many multinational companies and has had impact on policy, having advised the European Parliament, the European Commission, the OECD, and the UK Competition and Markets Authority on the regulation of digital platforms.
SMS Educational Impact Award
This award recognizes excellence in contributing to the teaching mission in strategic management.
Gautam Ahuja serves as the Eleanora and George Landew Professor of Management at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. His research interests include competitive analysis, innovation, globalization, and the use of inter-organizational arrangements such as mergers, acquisitions, and alliances. He is a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society (since 2023), Fellow of the Academy of Management (since 2021), and TIM Distinguished Scholar for lifetime achievement in research (2019), the highest award given by the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the Academy of Management. He has served as editor-in-chief of Organization Science, associate editor for Management Science and as a senior editor for Organization Science and Strategy Science.
In 2016, Ahuja received the BPS Wiley Outstanding Educator Award for his lifetime teaching contributions and in 2011, Bloomberg BusinessWeek ranked Ahuja number two in its listing of the Most Popular Professors in the United States in its Popularity Issue naming the market leaders in various business, product, and cultural categories. As a doctoral advisor, he has trained many students who are now faculty at some of the best institutions across the world.
Image credit: Jesse Winter. © Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
SMS Emerging Scholar Award
This award recognizes a relatively young or new scholar, who displays exemplary scholarship that promises to have an impact on future strategic management practice.
Sunkee Lee is a tenured Associate Professor of Organizational Theory and Strategy at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on individual and organizational learning, organization design, and the microfoundations of firm strategy and performance. His work has been published in leading management journals, including the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, and Management Science, and has received several awards, including the Academy of Management William H. Newman Award for Best Paper Based on a Dissertation (2017) and the Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award (2025). In 2024, he was named one of the Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors by Poets&Quants.
He currently serves as an associate editor at the Strategic Management Journal and co-editor-in-chief at the Journal of Organization Design. He is also a member of the editorial review board at Organization Science. He received his bachelor’s degree from Korea University, master’s degree from Seoul National University, and Ph.D. in Strategy from INSEAD.
SMS Service Award
This award is conferred in recognition of significant and enduring service that made an outstanding and distinguished contribution to the Strategic Management Society and its members.
Howard Thomas is an Emeritus Professor at Singapore Management University (SMU) and an internationally recognised scholar in strategic management and management education. He has held business school deanships, and senior administrative positions, at LBS (UK), AGSM (Australia), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, US), Warwick Business School (WBS, UK) and SMU (Asia). He has been awarded academic fellowships by AcSS (UK), AOM (US), CABS (UK), EURAM (Belgium), IOD (UK), LSW (Wales) and SMS (UK).
He was a founder member of SMS, Board Member, President, Dean of Fellows, and Chair of the SMS annual conference in Singapore. He has received Life – Time Achievement Awards from BAM(UK) and EFMD (Europe). He was also awarded the Cooper Leadership Medal for Outstanding Leadership by BAM as well as a similar Strategic Leadership Award by AACSB(US). He has been elected to honorary degrees by universities in Africa, Asia, Europe and the UK. He is currently a special advisor to EFMD Global, and its CEO.
Video Abstract Award
This award recognizes excellence in the content and quality of a video abstract for research published in SMS journals in the preceding year.
Resource Redeployment and New Technology Investment in the Energy Sector
Aldona Kapačinskaitė is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at INSEAD. She studies how firms allocate resources and manage proprietary information amid changing competitive and intellectual property environments. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, and Administrative Science Quarterly. Her research has been supported by the SMS Strategy Research Foundation and was recognized with the TIM Best Dissertation Award. She was also a finalist for the STR Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award. She serves on the Editorial Review Boards of the Strategic Management Journal and Organization Science, on the STR Executive Committee, and as Representative-at-Large of the SMS Entrepreneurship and Strategy Interest Group. Previously, she served on the TIM Executive Committee and the STR Membership Engagement Committee.
