Elie Sung Wins the 2020 TIM Best Dissertation Award

This year’s winner of the Best Dissertation Award in the Technology & Innovation Management (TIM) Division at the Academy of Management Conference is Elie Sung, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Business Policy at HEC Paris.

The TIM Best Dissertation Award is a prestigious and very competitive award that includes “dissertations from different disciplinary perspectives including management (strategy, organization theory, organizational behavior etc.) as well as economics, technology studies, sociology, etc.” and “consider[s] a broad range of methodologies”. (Read more in the call for submissions).
 
The dissertation is titled “The Co-Construction of Court-Made Patent Policy and Firm Strategy”. The list of prior TIM Division Best Dissertation Award recipients can be found here. 

Elie Sung’s research focuses on firm innovation strategy, including both their innovative activities and their corporate political activities to shape innovation policy. She has examined how firms and the courts jointly shape patent policy and how in turn those policies shape firms’ innovative activities.

Completed in August 2019, Elie Sung’s dissertation was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant in the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program.

She was a finalist for the Kauffman Prize for Best Student Paper at the REER conference (Roundtable for Engineering Entrepreneurship Research) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received the Best Paper for an Emerging Scholar Award at the European Policy for Intellectual Property conference.

Prior to her PhD, she worked in management consulting on projects with telecom and media operating companies, and national regulatory authorities. She completed an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, and graduate degrees in I.T. engineering and in applied economics.

Learn more about the research, explained by Elie Sung on Knowledge@HEC, "How Tech Firms Influence the US Supreme Court to Shape Innovation Policies".