Ankur Chavda Finalist for an Outstanding Dissertation Award

The Strategy and Business Policy Department at HEC Paris is proud to announce that Assistant Professor Ankur Chavda has been shortlisted for the 2020 Strategic Management (STR) Division Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award at the Academy of Management.

Professor Ankur Chavda is one of five finalist for the 2020 STR Division Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award at the Academy of Management. The Academy of Management, or AOM, is a professional association for scholars of management and organizations that publishes several academic journals, organizes conferences, and provides forums for management professors and managers to collaborate.

The STR Division Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award is a widely-recognized and competitive award with a large number of applications from all business schools worldwide. The list of prior recipients can be found here. 

Ankur Chavda’s dissertation, titled “Essays on the Production of Innovation”, is on the incentives for firms to improve their ability to produce innovations, central to both the competitive strategy of many firms and gains in productivity that lead to economic growth. 

Ankur Chavda used Netflix’s entry as a shock to television show production, exploring the trade-off between two approaches to creating innovative products (real options and commitment – i.e. embedding innovation in the heart of the firm’s objectives). Read his interview on Knowledge@HEC: "The Future of Netflix in the Face of a New Competition". 

Prior to entering academia, Ankur Chavda worked in the tech industry at start-ups in New York, London and Tokyo as well as at Microsoft in Seattle. He had a number of posts spanning ten years at Microsoft, the last one focused on strategy for the Windows organization.