With the "Best Paper Award", the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB) annually honours a remarkable international publication that has appeared in the last two years. A scientific commission selects scientific works published during this period, which, according to the criteria for the award, "represent an outstanding contribution".

In this sense we are pleased that Fabian Sting, Professor for Supply Chain Management - Strategy and Innovation at the University of Cologne, is one of the nominees for the 2020 edition. The study "The ideator's bias: How identity-induced self-efficacy drives overestimation in employee-driven process innovation", written jointly with Prof. Dr. Christoph Fuchs and Prof. Dr. Oliver Alexy from the Technical University of Munich, as well as Dr. Maik Schlickel (Nobilia GmbH, Gütersloh), is, in the view of the VHB colleagues, one of the nine prize-worthy papers.

With the help of a company data set on employee-driven process innovations, a qualitative study and four scenario-based experiments, the four authors investigated the extent to which idea generators in companies systematically overestimate their own innovation ideas, and why certain ideas are more susceptible to these distorted evaluations than others. For companies, the results contain important implications, since understanding the true value of ideas is crucial for the success of innovation.

• The study is published in the Academy of Management Journal Vol 62
• Information on all nominees and the VHB's "Best Paper Award" can be found on the VHB website (German).
• Find-an-expert page of Professor Dr. Fabian J. Sting