UCL School of Management

17 November 2020

PhD student wins 2020 INFORMS TIMES Best Working Paper Award

Photo of virtual awards ceremony with the winners (two females and one male) of best working paper's photos on screen

Congratulations to fifth-year PhD student Sidika Tunc Candogan and her co-authors, Gizem Korpeoglu, Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and Chris Tang, Distinguished Professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, for winning the 2020 INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship Section (TIMES) Best Working Paper Award Competition.

Upon hearing the news Sidika said, “The INFORMS TIMES  Best Working Paper Award Competition is a very prestigious competition and it is a great honour and very encouraging to be selected as the winner in this competition”.

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 experts in this field, 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. 

Sidika’s supervisor and group lead for Operations & Technology and Marketing and Analytics research groups, Bilal Gokpinar said: “This is a great achievement for Sidika and significant recognition of the quality and promise of her PhD research by INFORMS, the leading academic society in our field. As a senior PhD student Sidika is a great role model for our junior PhD students, she already had a top publication accepted and she has other highly promising and well-received papers like this one. Warmest congratulations to Sidika and her coauthors again for this brilliant award.” 

In this paper titled Team Collaboration in Innovation Contests,’ 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.

School of Management PhD Programme Director Davide Ravasi said: “I am very happy for Sidika, because this award testifies to the excellent quality of her research and is a fitting recognition of her efforts. This award also reminds us that, small as it is, our doctoral programme really has world-class students that, also thanks to the great work of my colleagues who serve as supervisors, can aspire to the highest achievements.”

Last updated Monday, 4 January 2021