Luís Filipe Lages wins world prize for his research on Tuguese exporters

uís Filipe Lages, Full Professor at Nova SBE with extensive experience in executive education, won one of the most important awards worldwide in the field of Marketing, the 2018 American Marketing Association Research in Excellence Award. This award recognises the impact of his research on Portuguese exporters in global marketing over the last decade.

He has been analysing the impact of strategy on company performance since 1996, demonstrating that managers define their current strategy based on previous performance results. Contrary to most research in this area, Luís Filipe Lages argues that performance affects current strategy, which in turn affects future performance.

In 2008, Luís Filipe Lages published, together with Sandy Jap, from Emory University, and David Griffith, from Michigan State University, an article in the Journal of International Business Studies entitled "The role of past performance in export ventures: a short-term reactive approach". That article earned him an AMA Global Marketing SIG Research in Excellence Award which "recognises an outstanding article published in a globally recognised and respected journal that has made a significant contribution to the global marketing literature over the last ten years".

For the researcher, this award is particularly special because it took 10 years for the scientific community to accept this disruptive idea. According to the Nova SBE Professor, "this work calls into question previous works that assume that managers are proactive and that performance is a consequence of strategy". This idea of looking at the relationship between business strategy and performance as something dynamic is at the origin of the Value Creation Wheel (VCW), a business tool created by the researcher.

VCW has been helping organisations in over 20 countries solve their challenges over the past decade. As a result, its components have been taught at renowned schools, from MIT to the City University of Hong Kong, receiving coverage in major international media such as Harvard Business Press, Time and the Wall Street Journal.

The award ceremony will take place in August during the American Marketing Association conference in Boston.