2024 JIBS Decade Award

The Selection Committee for the JIBS Decade Award is pleased to announce that the 2014 JIBS article “A dynamic capabilities-based entrepreneurial theory of the multinational enterprise” by David J. Teece has been selected as the winner of the 2024 JIBS Decade Award.

The award, sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan, is designed to recognize the most influential paper published in the Journal of International Business Studies ten years prior and is presented at the annual Academy of International Business (AIB) conference. In order to be considered for the JIBS Decade Award, an article must be one of the five most cited articles published in JIBS for the year being considered. This year’s Selection Committee members were Kaz Asakawa (Keio University, Japan), Catherine Welch (Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland), Peter Liesch (University of Queensland, Australia), Andrew Delios (National University of Singapore, Singapore), and Rosalie L. Tung (Simon Fraser University, Canada; Committee Chair and JIBS Editor-in-Chief).

In recommending the award-winning article, the Committee noted that aside from citation relation considerations that led it to being short-listed, the article stands out for several other reasons as well.

First, Teece’s study opened the door for scholars in innovation to engage in international business (IB) research. Second, this study is a challenge to fundamental discussions on what are or what should be the conceptual foundations for IB research and for research on multinational firms. Third, Teece shifts the theoretical foundations of a theory of the multinational enterprise (MNE), the very nature of the MNE and its boundaries, so that it becomes a theory of organizational change. In doing so, he makes not just innovation, but entrepreneurship and managerial leadership central to understanding the long-term competitive advantage of the MNE. Fourth, this study’s approach can feed usefully into key findings that can foster valuable, thought-provoking discussion and debate by scholars and students. Fifth, DCB is perhaps even more relevant today than when it was published in 2014. DCB provides the framework to help us better understand the role of MNEs under volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions, such as bifurcation/trifurcation. Finally, international business scholars who are seeking insight on new ways that MNEs shape their business environments in our changing world will find insight in Teece (2014) as his international (strategic) management approach offers pillars aligned with understanding the causes of differential performance in MNEs.