Surrey Professor Annabelle Gawer wins prestigious 2026 strategy award for scholarly impact on practice

Professor Gawer, Director of the Centre of Digital Economy (CoDE) at Surrey Business School, has won the 2026 CK Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice from the Strategic Management Society (SMS). 

The SMS created this accolade to celebrate exceptional scholars whose research fundamentally bridges the gap between management theory and everyday business practice. Past recipients include seminal strategic management scholars Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen, Kathy Eisenhardt, and David Teece. 

Professor Gawer is an authority on the business of digital platforms and platform-based innovation ecosystems and holds the Chair in Digital Economy at Surrey Business School.  She is the author of more than 60 articles and four books, including The Business of Platforms (2019), written with Michael Cusumano and David Yoffie, and her Google Scholar profile shows 38,000 citations as of July 2026.  

Professor Gawer was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023 and named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2022, 2023 and 2025, when she was also the most-cited female academic in the UK in Economics and Business. 

Beyond academia, Gawer has served as a Digital Expert to the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). She has advised the European Commission on platform regulation as an Expert Member of its Observatory of the Online Platform Economy (2018–2021), and has also advised the House of Lords, the UK Government, the OECD, and the World Bank. At Surrey, she directs the Centre of Digital Economy (CoDE). 

The recipient is selected each year by a subcommittee appointed by the SMS Awards and Honors Committee, based on nominations submitted by SMS members. 

Professor Annabelle Gawer said: 

"I am thrilled to have received this wonderful honour, which has allowed me to reflect on my research and work – much of which would not have been possible without wonderful colleagues at CoDE and the support of the University of Surrey. If my work has helped executives build better platforms and better govern their ecosystems, and has enabled regulators to develop better regulation to limit platform abuse of power, that’s exactly what I set out to do.” 

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