Professor Constance Helfat Wins Strategy Award

Honored for influential research on business strategy.

Constance E. Helfat, the J. Brian Quinn Professor in Technology and Strategy at Tuck, has just been awarded the Viipuri Prize from the Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), in Finland. The Viipuri Prize is given every second year to “an internationally acclaimed researcher whose work significantly contributes to the research and teaching at the LUT School of Business,” according to the prize announcement. Previous winners include such strategy luminaries as John Kay, of the London School of Economics, and the late CK Prahalad, who taught at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

Helfat, who has been teaching at Tuck for 16 years, was recognized by the Society for the Viipuri School of Economics for her influential research on “business and corporate strategy, especially firm capabilities and adaptation to change, with application to innovation, top management, and vertical integration.”

Helfat received the award at LUT on Dec. 4 and thereafter delivered the Viipuri lecture on dynamic managerial capabilities, or the role of managers as leaders of strategic change in organizations. That’s also the topic of Helfat’s most recent paper, co-authored with Tuck professor Margaret Peteraf, titled “Managerial Cognitive Capabilities and the Microfoundations of Dynamic Capabilities,” which is forthcoming in Strategic Management Journal.

At Tuck, Helfat teaches the elective Strategic Principles for Internet Businesses, and the Research-to-Practice seminar Deconstructing Apple, which examines corporate strategy through the lens of one of the most influential corporations in the history of business. She also co-edits Strategic Management Journal, and is an organizer of The FIVE Project, which aims to expand research on firm and industry evolution and related areas of entrepreneurship.