Friends of Strategy Science,
We are pleased to announce the 2025 Strategy Science Best Paper Award has been given to:
Gino Cattani, Daniel Sands, Joe Porac, and Jason Greenberg
for their paper
"Competitive Sensemaking in Value Creation and Capture,"
Strategy Science 3:4, pp.632-657, published in 2018.
From the comments of the awards committee:
"This paper makes a distinctive and timely contribution by beginning to bring a socio-cognitive sensibility into the value-based view of strategy, a framework that has become central to both strategic scholarship and pedagogy. The authors argue that understanding value creation and capture requires not only economic logic but also attention to the interpretive processes through which strategists make sense of their competitive environments. In particular, value-based theory requires that actors understand their marginal contributions to all possible coalitions that they could form with others. Since this is not knowable for boundedly rational actors, this article maps out the cognitive processes by which such perceptions are formed.
The reasons for selection include:
- Conceptual ambition. The paper articulates a novel and generative framework-competitive sensemaking-that promises to open new avenues for research at the intersection of cognition and competitive strategy. The framework synthesizes insights from strategic management, sociology, and cognitive science, demonstrating how cognitive microfoundations can enrich core strategic frameworks.
- Foundational character. The paper tackles one of the most important yet under-theorized aspects of strategy: how firms interpret, construct, and reshape their competitive landscape.
- Pedagogical relevance. The ideas are not only theoretically rich but, once properly developed, also relevant for teaching. They offer instructors tools for helping students think about the interpretive and relational aspects of strategic positioning.
In recognizing this paper, the committee sought to highlight a conceptual contribution that expands how we think about competition -- not simply as a phenomenon to be analyzed, but as a social and cognitive process to be understood and navigated."
Thank you to this year's awards committee: Giovanni Gavetti, Michael Lenox, and Russ Coff.
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