Professor Satish Nambisan, Department of Design and Innovation and the Nancy and Joseph Keithley Professorship of Technology Management received the 2024 Helena Yli-Renko Research Impact Award at this year’s Academy of Management meeting in Chicago, Aug 9-13.
The award is given by the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management and is determined by the number of Social Sciences Citation Index citations. It honors the most impactful entrepreneurship paper published six years prior to 2024. Papers published in leading management and entrepreneurship journals are eligible for the award.
Nambisan earned the award for the research paper, Digital Affordances, Spatial Affordances, and the Genesis of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal in 2018.
He co-wrote the paper with Dr. Llewellyn Thomas, Associate Professor at IESE Business School in Barcelona and Visiting Professor at Imperial College Business School, Erkko Autio, Chair in Technology Venturing at Imperial College Business School of London, and the late Mike Wright, former Professor of Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School and world-renowned academic.
“We are deeply honored to be recognized by this award and very happy to know our contribution here has been helpful in moving research forward.
“Our main goal in this paper was to describe entrepreneurial ecosystems as a distinct digital economy phenomenon and to bring a digitalization lens to differentiate them from geographically bounded industrial and regional clusters that we are all familiar with.
“We show how entrepreneurial ecosystems harnesses technological affordances created by digital technologies and infrastructures and combines them with spatial (or, proximity-related) affordances to support unique paths of entrepreneurial opportunity discovery, pursuit, and scale-up,” Nambisan said.