Congratulations to PhD Student Sidika and her co-authors, Gizem Korpeoglu from Bilkent University and Chris Tang from UCLA Anderson School of Management, for making the final of the 2020 INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship Section (TIMES) Best Working Paper Award Competition.

Sidika is a fifth-year PhD student in Management Science and Operations at UCL School of Management and also supports with teaching in the field of technology and operations management. Her research focuses on the quantitative analysis of operations at online crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms.

The INFORMS TIMES Best Working Paper Award Competition aims to promote the most recent advances in the area of technology management, product/process innovation, business model innovation, new product development, and entrepreneurship. Each submission is judged by a panel of domain experts, based on the novelty and innovativeness of the paper’s contribution and its potential impact on the theory and practice of technology management, innovation management and entrepreneurship. 

Their paper, ‘Team Collaboration in Innovation Contests,’ has been selected as one of three finalists, and they will present the paper in the award session at 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting in November*.

In this paper, Sidika, Gizem, and Chris are motivated from different policies adopted by various crowdsourcing platforms (such as InnoCentive and Topcoder) and identify conditions under which an organiser and solvers benefit from team submissions in an innovation contest. Their results provide a plausible explanation for why some platforms encourage team submissions, while others discourage them.

We wish them the best of luck with this award!

*Update: We are delighted to announce that Sidika and her co-authors won the award. You can read more about their achievement here.