March 6, 2009

Stuart Read, Dean of Research and Development and Professor of Marketing, and Stefan Michel, Professor of Marketing, have been recognized for their outstanding papers by the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2009.

Professor Read received the distinction for his writing of Immortal firms in mortal markets: An entrepreneurial perspective on the Innovator's dilemma. The article, co-authored with Nicholas Dew, Saras D. Sarasvathy and Robert Wiltbank, was published in the European Journal of Innovation Management. The paper’s findings suggest that the practical answer to the innovator's dilemma is not to predict technology trajectories more accurately, or otherwise strive to build immortal firms in mortal markets. Instead, innovation managers should focus on building new markets. This will inevitably involve pluralizing decision-making technologies by including some aspects of effectual decision making (used by expert entrepreneurs) into the decision-making processes of large firms.

Professor Michel was recognized for his paper Service Recovery Paradox: True but Overrated? co-authored by Matt Meuter. The article was published in the Journal of Service Management, Vol. 19, No. 4. The aim of Professor Michel’s paper was to test the existence of the service recovery paradox, which refers to situations in which the satisfaction, word-of-mouth intentions, and repurchase rates of recovered customers exceed those of customers who have not encountered any problems with the initial service. Based on a study including more than 11,000 customer interviews, Professor Michel’s paper indicates that such excellent recoveries are rare. Read Professor Michel’s Tomorrow’s Challenge article Recovering from Service Failure.

Every year Emerald invites each journal’s Editorial Team to nominate what they believe has been that title’s Outstanding Paper and up to three Highly Commended Papers from the previous 12 months. Both Professor Read and Michel’s papers were selected as among the most impressive pieces of work the teams had seen throughout 2008. Read more about the Awards for Excellence.