The finalists
Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.
Xiaoquan Zhang
FinTech as a Game Changer: Overview of Research Frontiers
Mobile payments, cryptocurrencies and the digitisation of business assets have pushed financial technology to the stage of disruptive innovation. Surveying this emerging FinTech landscape, the work reviews the technological, pedagogical and managerial issues involved, focusing on market trading, artificial intelligence and blockchain in finance, and maps research directions to stimulate future work across information systems and finance.
Kai Pan
A Polyhedral Study on Fuel-Constrained Unit Commitment
Associate Professor of operations management in PolyU's Faculty of Business, Kai Pan works on stochastic and discrete optimisation for energy markets, supply chains and smart cities. His multi-institution study with colleagues at PolyU, Shenzhen and Argonne National Laboratory derives strong valid inequalities for fuel-constrained unit commitment, sharpening how power producers schedule generation under uncertainty.
Mostafa Monzur Hasan
Organizational capital, corporate tax avoidance, and firm value
Some of a firm's value sits in its organisational capital: its systems, know-how and management practices rather than its machinery. Examining the links between organisational capital, corporate tax avoidance and firm value, the work brings those three strands into a single analysis of what makes an intangible asset pay.
Lu Yang
CSR contracting and performance-induced CEO turnover
Boards increasingly tie executive reward to social and environmental goals, and this study looks at what that means when performance disappoints. Its subject is the relationship between corporate social responsibility contracting and performance-induced chief executive turnover, a question that bears directly on how firms hold their leaders to account.
Shahrooz Shahparvari
Designing a supply chain that also collects and reprocesses returned goods is a hard optimisation problem, and this paper tackles it with energy use included. The model spans suppliers, manufacturers, distribution and collection centres, customer zones and disposal, weighing total profit against energy consumption and jobs created, and is solved using Lagrangian relaxation, reformulations and heuristics.
Xinwen Hu
The green fog: Environmental rating disagreement and corporate greenwashing
When rating agencies cannot agree on how green a company is, that disagreement itself may be telling. The study examines the relationship between environmental rating disagreement and corporate greenwashing, treating inconsistency between environmental ratings as its starting point rather than as a nuisance to be averaged away.
Jaideep Prabhu
Professor of Marketing and Nehru Professor of Indian Business at Cambridge Judge Business School, Jaideep Prabhu studies innovation in firms and government. His co-authored Research Policy article examines how design thinking shapes public sector innovation, showing that risk-taking and cognitive empathy improve individual performance while emotional empathy can hinder it, drawing on evidence from public sector professionals.
Haipeng Shen
Can Customer Arrival Rates Be Modelled by Sine Waves?
Patrick S C Poon Professor in Analytics and Innovation and Associate Dean at HKU Business School, Haipeng Shen researches data-driven decision making in healthcare and service operations. With co-authors at the University of Toronto and Emory University, his Service Science paper tests whether customer arrival rates can be modelled by sine waves, guiding demand forecasting and staffing in service systems.
Peter Guenther
Improving PLS-SEM use for business marketing research
Reviewing more than two decades of studies in business marketing research, the work examines how partial least squares structural equation modelling has been used and where practice falls short. It shows that justifications, reporting and model assessment are often insufficient, and points researchers towards more appropriate tests and advanced techniques that strengthen the robustness of results.
Nurlan Orazalin
Board Sustainability Committees, Climate Change Initiatives, Carbon Performance, and Market Value
Do boards that set up a sustainability committee actually cut emissions? Using a panel of 8,408 observations from 35 countries between 2002 and 2019, the study finds higher greenhouse gas emissions associated with lower market value, and reports that such committees are linked to higher market value without evidence of improved carbon performance.
Exclusive to partners
The Subject Awards are open to partner universities.
Partners verify their data, feature their academics, and are eligible for the Subject Awards. Finalists are identified from open data; winners are decided by our editorial team and announced on 15 September 2026.
Explore partnership →The wider slate
Fifteen more candidate partnerships behind the finalists.
Leadership and Job Demands-Resources Theory: A Systematic Review
Conceptualizing the Circular Economy (Revisited): An Analysis of 221 Definitions
Thirty years of research in family business journals: Status quo and future directions
Artificial intelligence and knowledge sharing: Contributing factors to organizational performance
The biggest business process management problems to solve before we die
The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Finance and Beyond
Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies
Corporate directors' implicit theories of the roles and duties of boards
← All subject awards · The full Business, Management & Accounting index →