Schulich Faculty Earned Best Industry Studies Paper Honour

FACULTY RESEARCH IMPACTS

Schulich Professor Earns Best Industry Studies Paper Honour

Moren Lévesque

Moren Lévesque, Schulich Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems (OMIS) and CPA Ontario Chair in International Entrepreneurship, and her colleagues have been chosen as the second-place winners of the prestigious 2021 Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award.

The Production and Operations Management serves as the flagship research journal in operations management in manufacturing and services. The journal publishes scientific research into the problems, interest, and concerns of managers who manage product and process design, operations, and supply chains. The journal is among the Financial Times Top 50 journals used in business school research rankings since the ranking’s inception in the late 1990s. Presented by the Industry Studies Association for excellence in industry studies research, the award hopes to encourage a cultural shift among scholars toward explicit recognition of their engagement with industry practitioners and demonstrate the benefits of such interactions for scholarly research. It is often the case that scholars benefit from interactions with industry practitioners in ways that shape the nature of the problems they address, the methodologies employed, and/or the interpretations of their findings. Professor Lévesque proudly quoted a note from the Editor who nominated her co-authored research for this Paper Award, stating that “[m]ulti-method research as you have done is extremely difficult to pull off, particularly with the quality and rigour of this paper.”

The study, published in Production and Operations Management, shows that scientific teams in biopharma companies might be allocating too much time to early-stage drug discovery projects that are doomed to fail. “A central feature of drug discovery projects is whether the drug is more of a follower-type or first of its kind,” says Professor Lévesque. By nature, first-in-class drugs face significantly more risk during their development since they have no predecessors to learn from. “Whether a drug is a follower or first-in-class is not a binary measure, but more like a continuum because it is captured by the number of competitors that engage in the discovery of similar drugs,” remarked Lévesque. “To balance risk and return, biopharmas should favour delaying pulling the plug on those projects in the middle of this continuum.”

As also articulated in a March 2021 article published in The Globe and Mail on this study, “[p]harmaceutical industry managers and research team leaders, the authors argue, should discontinue early-stage drugs not just because they aren’t panning out as expected, but also for business reasons relating to their overall portfolios — an approach, they observe, that AstraZeneca adopted after a shake-up of its R&D operations in 2011.” But as Lévesque warns, for established biopharmas with multiple late-stage drug development projects, “the opportunity cost is small enough to warrant taking the risk of hitting a winner” especially if the research is constrained to a small group of scientists.

Professor Lévesque’s main research is embedded in entrepreneurial decision-making. She demonstrates how the strengths of a mathematical approach to theory development can offer a compelling argument for its use in organizational studies and, more specifically, entrepreneurship.

Professor Lévesque has had a stellar career that has brought great distinction to the Schulich School of Business. Recruited in 2009, Professor Lévesque played a central role in strengthening the global reputation of the School in the areas of developing state-of-the-art entrepreneurship programs and conducting innovative entrepreneurship research, as well as nurturing national and international research collaborations through her many journal publications, book chapters, and conference proceedings. Professor Lévesque’s main research is embedded in entrepreneurial decision-making. She demonstrates how the strengths of a mathematical approach to theory development can offer a compelling argument for its use in organizational studies and, more specifically, entrepreneurship. Professor Lévesque is a Senior Research Fellow and served as the Lazaridis Visiting Chair and conducted research in the Lazaridis Institute for the Management of Technology Enterprises at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. She was also a Visiting Professor and Researcher and conducted research at the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research (ACE) at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia; at the Graduate School of Technology and Innovation Management, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Ulsan, South Korea; and Singapore University of Technology and Design and National University of Singapore, Singapore. Previously, she held the prestigious title of Canada Research Chair in Innovation and Technical Entrepreneurship. No matter which benchmark of achievement you use — whether the number of publications or the number of various awards and accolades, Lévesque is in an elite class. The award she received is a strong testament to that. She also received the 2021 Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division’s Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award in recognition of her innovative and impactful contributions to entrepreneurship scholarship, as well as the 2019 Technology, Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship Section (TIMES) Service Award from the Institutes for Operations Management and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for her continued involvement with the TIMES Section.

ABOUT THE INDUSTRY STUDIES ASSOCIATION

In 1990, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation began a program sponsoring academic research on industries through research centres at major universities. The Sloan program grew to include twenty-six centres spanning a broad set of traditional and emerging industries and cross-industry analysis research.

Eventually, the list of scholars engaged in related research expanded well beyond the industry centres to include over 1200 Sloan Industry Studies Affiliates. This encouraged the establishment of the Industry Studies Association to advance industry studies scholarships and research, making significant contributions to academic knowledge, industry practice, and public policy.