Copenhagen Prize
Henrik Dellestrand & Philip Kappen, Uppsala University, Sweden
"Headquarter allocation of resources to intra-MNE transfer projects"

IMR International Marketing Award
Claude Obadia, Advancia-Negocia, France & Irena Vida, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia & James Reardon, University of Northern Carolina, U.S.A.
"Revisiting importers' roles in export performance models"

Irene Vida and Claude Obadia with Martyn Lawrence from Emerald

International Journal of Emerging Markets
Churu Lin & Elizabeth L. Rose, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand & Peter Zettinig, Turku School of Economics, Finland
"Internationalisation patterns of Chinese entrepreneurial firms"

IBR Best Paper of the Year Award
Xuefei Ma & Andrew Delios, National University of Singapore
"A new tale of two cities: Japanese FDIs in Shanghai and Beijing, 1979 - 2003"

Best Doctoral Thesis Proposal Award
Pooja Thakur, Rutgers University, U.S.A.
"Externalisation of Core Activities and their Geographical Coverage: In-House versus Offshoring versus Outsourcing of Clinical Trials"

AND

The fourth Distinguished EIBA Honorary Fellows Award was handed over in 2008 to Eli Hurvitz, CEO of Teva Company.
 

Reflections from the 2008 EIBA Conference in Tallinn

The conference in Tallinn was the second EIBA conference that I attended and I was quite busy during this conference, attending the doctorial consortium, having two papers accepted and attending different sessions. All good fun and looking back at the conference I have to say that all the late hours spent at the office was indeed worth it. You get to meet new and old friends and colleagues, get feedback on your own work and hopefully also get some good ideas attending other people’s presentations.

I arrived in a snowy Tallinn on a Wednesday evening, attending a pre-conference dinner together with the other participants in the Doctorial Tutorial. This provided an opportunity for the faculty and the Ph.D students to get to know each other before the tutorial started. It was really relaxed and everyone was friendly, with a little bit of anticipation in the air from the students’ side for the upcoming event. I had been talking to some friends of mine whom previously had participated in the tutorial, and their take on the tutorial was that it was tough but really good for the progress of the thesis work.

The tutorial started early Thursday morning and I was the second student to present my work. I think it went quite well, and indeed it was worth it. I got really good feedback, it was tough but really constructive and I have really benefited from the comments and suggestions given by the panel of professors. The day progressed with presentations dealing with a wide variety of IB topics. So, by attending, I did not only get excellent feedback on my own research, I also got a comprehensive overview of what other people were doing, and I could relate the feedback my fellow Ph.D students received to my own work as well. Throughout the conference, the participants at the doctorial tutorial met up for informal lunches and a dinner as well as drinks and this made the conference even more fun. I think every Ph.D student should apply for and try to participate in this type of event; it is beneficial both in terms of building networks but also for the high quality feedback received.

After an exhausting day it was time for the conference to officially start and I met up with friends from all over Europe, catching up with them since last time we met, identifying possible interesting sessions as well as coordinating schedules. Out of my two papers accepted for the conference, I had managed to convince one of my co-authors to present one. This was a Friday morning session, but a decent crowd turned up and the session turned out to be really good. We got good feedback from the session participants and the other papers presented were really interesting. My colleague and I walked away from this morning session satisfied, with new ideas for a paper spurred by the other presentations. Later I presented the second paper accepted for the conference with one of my co-authors in the audience. This session went well. After the conference, we have been able to (hopefully) develop the papers even further based on comments, both from session participants and reviewer comments received before the conference.

The conference ended with a big gala dinner at the Estonia Concert Hall. The setting of this dinner was wonderful with nice food, drinks and entertainment. The people attending the doctorial consortium were speculating on who was going to be singled out as having the most promising thesis proposal. We all sat at the same table, talking about the conference - and enjoying a few drinks as well - when I was approached by the chairman of the EIBA board, Danny Van Den Bulcke. Danny informed me that I was not the one who was going to get the award, it was instead going to Pooja Thakur from Rutgers University (congratulations again Pooja, it was well deserved), although Danny told me to be ready anyway since I was going to get a best reviewer award! This was indeed good news since I believe it to be a very nice recognition for the important work of reviewing, a task I think should be taken seriously. Just moments later I was then approached by Torben Pedersen from Copenhagen Business School. Knowing Torben from the Nordic Research School of International Business for PhD Students (Nord-IB) I thought he just wanted to engage in some small talk. Imagine my surprise when Torben told me that one of my papers, co-authored with another PhD student from Uppsala Philip Kappen, had been singled out for the Copenhagen Prize! When I told Philip about this he did not believe me. However, it turned out to be true. This was great, Philip and I had been working hard on the paper together, but we were not sure what other people thought of it, but this was some sort of confirmation that our ideas worked. It turned out to be a night of celebration that continued well past midnight. On the plane back home to Sweden the following day, besides being a bit tired, I was also keen on continuing to work on my old and new ideas, inspired by what had been taking place at the EIBA conference in Tallinn.

Henrik Dellestrand and Philip Kappen with Torben Pedersen from CBS