SuperEurope: The Unexpected Hero of the 21st Century by Arturo Bris, Douglas Geertz IMEDE 1988 Professor in Geopolitics and Business, Professor of Finance, and Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center, has been awarded a silver medal in the International Business category at the 2026 Axiom Book Awards.
The book is a vindication of Europe. It challenges the view of Europe as a tired, overregulated continent, arguing instead that Europe has emerged from decades of crisis—financial turmoil, Brexit, COVID-19, war in Ukraine—as a resilient, reformed, and quietly successful model of governance and society.
“The negative perspective about Europe coming from within Europe was the impetus for this book. I noticed it even before the Draghi report came out. There was a certain internal pessimism that Europe lacked innovation and that it was overregulated. It’s funny, even when you present people with data to the contrary, they say ‘that can’t be right because it’s not what I see in my company’,” said Bris.
While acknowledging unresolved issues—defense, migration, competitiveness—it argues that Europe’s model is not obsolete, but exemplary. The continent’s trajectory is positive.
“Europe houses some of the most competitive and prosperous nations in the world. SuperEurope (a conceptual alliance that I coined, encompassing the EU’s 27 members, plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK—plus, optimistically speaking, Ukraine) remains a pole of attraction of foreign talent,” added Bris.
“Everybody wants to live in Europe; we are more equal, less corrupted, and happier than the US or China. Our health and education systems are the role model for many countries worldwide. It is the rest of the world that should learn from Europe.”
The AI-Centred Enterprise by Amit Joshi, Professor of AI and Strategy, Natarajan Balasubramanian, and Ram Bala, has been awarded a silver medal in the ‘Emerging Trends / AI’ category. The book demonstrates how context-aware AI is transforming organizations and redefining the future of enterprise success.
It urges business leaders to rethink the fundamentals of generative AI and move beyond short-term, tactical wins. Tools like ChatGPT represent only the beginning of Context-Aware AI-intelligent systems that understand both the content and intent of unstructured human input.
“Organizations implementing AI typically gravitate towards adding these tools to existing processes with the aim of making them more efficient. While a good way to start, this strategy seldom captures all the value that AI is capable of delivering,” Joshi said. “What my co-authors and I propose in this book is that firms rethink and redesign their systems with AI at the core, to truly drive AI transformation.”
Drawing on real-world case studies and academic insights, the authors reveal how Context-Aware AI can transform organizational interactions, enable new forms of collaboration, and lay the foundation for the AI-Centered Enterprise.
The annual Axiom Business Book Awards recognizes outstanding business books in more than 25 categories.
