Strategic Management Society Awards Honors Blank, Piezunka
Each year the Strategic Management Society honors the leaders both established and emerging who have had significant impact on strategic management and business practice. This year, SMS recognized Stanford Adjunct Professor Steve Blank (above left) with the Strategy Leadership Impact Award and gave STVP PhD alum Henning Piezunka (above right) the Emerging Scholar award.
The Impact Award honors a business leader who has altered industry practice and garnered academic attention in major business schools. On conferring the award to Blank, the Society said.
Over the past several decades, Steve has exemplified sustained strategic leadership and innovation, fundamentally transforming the practice of strategy in entrepreneurship. As the architect of the Customer Development Methodology and a pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, Steve redefined how startups approach strategy. His insights have reshaped entrepreneurial strategy, emphasizing experimentation, customer feedback, and adaptability. Through visionary leadership and a relentless focus on experimentation and adaptability, Steve has had a profound and lasting impact on strategic thinking across sectors.
Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Widely known as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship, he is credited with developing the Lean Startup method and the curriculums for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps and Hacking for Defense and Diplomacy. He’s changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.
In his acceptance speech, Blank talked about shifting his role from that of a practitioner – with a background in cold war weapons systems – to one of a strategist:
We had been trapped in thinking that startups were smaller versions of large companies. When the reality was that at their core, large companies were executing known business models, but startups? Startups were searching for business models. This distinction between startup search and large company execution had never been clearly articulated. We needed to reframe entrepreneurship as a strategic process, not a financial one. I realized that every startup believed their journey was unique, and thought they had to find their own path to profitability and scale. That was because we had no shared methodology, language or common tools. So I decided to build them.
Henning Piezunka honored with Emerging Scholar Award
STVP PhD alumnus and current Wharton Associate Professor Henning Piezunka was honored with the Emerging Scholar award for his “impactful and rigorous research and broad contribution to the field, positioning him among the emerging leaders in the field of strategic management.”
Piezunka is originally from Heidelberg, Germany. His research focuses on collaboration, competition and crowdsourcing. Before joining Wharton, he spent a decade teaching at INSEAD. In addition to his Stanford PhD, he holds a Diplom-Kaufmann from the University of Mannheim and a master of science from the London School of Economics. Piezunka serves as an associate editor at Management Science and Journal of Organizational Design.
