On Thursday September 8th , the NOBEM-thesis of the year award was presented at the PREBEM conferences in Rotterdam NOBEM to Maarten Batterink. Maarten Batterink did his PhD at the Department of Business Administration of Wageningen University, part of Wageningen UR. The title of his thesis was ’Profiting from external knowledge: How companies use different knowledge acquisition strategies to improve their innovation performance.’ The supervisors were Prof. dr. Dr S.W.F. (Onno) Omta, and Dr Emiel F.M. Wubben. Currently Maarten Batterink is working for the consultancy and research bureau Significant in Barneveld.
NOBEM is a foundation of eleven partner universities (Netherlands Organization for Research in Business Economics and Management) and aims to promote research in business and economics in the broadest sense. The jury consists of three emeritus professors of business administration and business economics. Each university is allowed to nominate one dissertation. For the year 2009 seven theses were nominated.
The dissertations are judged on the following points: 1. Scientific value, 2. value for management practice 3. quality and originality of the methodology, and 4. Consistency and overall assessment of the dissertation.
The jury scores the above four points for each thesis on a scale from 1 to 10 in two rounds. It is unprecedented that a thesis of a former PhD student scored a 8 or higher for each of the aforementioned points by each juror individually in the first round. Following the discussion in the first round, the two best dissertations were reread and were submitted to various experts, after which each juror scored again. In the past that could lead to strong revisions of the original scores. In this case it was not the case and the original high assessments remained, indicating the excellence of the thesis of Maarten Batterink.