The Industrial and Corporate Change Association plays a central role in recognizing and promoting outstanding research in economics, management, history and related fields. Through its involvement with two distinguished awards, it fosters rigorous scholarship and supports innovative contributions by younger researchers, highlighting work that advances both theory and empirical analyses, aimed to a better understanding of technological change, industrial dynamics and economic growth.
The Christopher Freeman and Richard R. Nelson Prize is awarded every two years for the best article published in Industrial and Corporate Change. The editors of ICC journal serve as judges, with particular attention to younger scholars whose work opens new avenues for the study of innovation, technological change, corporate dynamics and industrial evolution. Named after Christopher Freeman and Richard R. Nelson, two of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, the prize reflects their enduring legacy in shaping how we understand the relationships between science, technology, firms and economic growth.
The Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award honors excellence in field-based research on industries and firms. Editors from leading journals in management, economics, and organization studies nominate recently published articles that combine methodological rigor with deep contextual insight into industrial dynamics. From these nominations, a selection committee identifies the most significant contributions of the year, highlighting work that advances both theory and understanding of real-world industrial contexts.
Below, we present the nominated articles and the works with each prize, showing the outstanding research recognized and celebrated through these awards.
The Christopher Freeman and Richard R. Nelson Prize, 2025 has been awarded to the articles:
- “Intellectual Monopolies as a New Pattern of Innovation and Technological Regime” by Cecilia Rikap.
The prize recognizes outstanding contributions to innovation studies and highlights the article’s compelling analysis of the changing dynamics of innovation and technological development.
The winning article can be read at the following link: https://academic.oup.com/icc/article/33/5/1037/7462137?login=true
- “Inflation in times of overlapping emergencies: Systemically significant prices from an input–output perspective” by Isabella M. Weber, Jesus Lara Jauregui, Lucas Teixeira, Luiza Nassif Pires.
The prize recognizes the paper’s innovative contribution to understanding inflation through the structure of production, identifying “systemically significant prices” whose shocks propagate across the economy. It was awarded for advancing research on how sectoral dynamics and supply shocks shape macroeconomic stability.
The winning article can be read at the following link:
https://academic.oup.com/icc/article/33/2/297/7603347?searchresult=1
The articles nominated for The Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award, 2025 are:
- “Tracing competencies and product requirements in technology space: a new perspective on firm and industry evolution” by Florian Metzler
https://academic.oup.com/icc/article/34/3/531/7833197?searchresult=1
Florian Metzler introduces a novel way to map firms’ technological capabilities in a dynamic “technology space,” revealing how companies succeed by positioning themselves within evolving technological landscapes. Applied to the mobile phone industry, it offers new insights into how entrants like Apple and Google outperformed established incumbents. - “Smile Curve of Technological Learning: A Case Study of Nuclear Power Reactor Technology in China” byWenyin Cheng, Zhaochen Li, Jin Chen, Bo Meng, Ming Ye
https://academic.oup.com/icc/article-abstract/34/5/957/8127867?redirectedFrom=fulltext
The paper develops a framework to understand how different technological learning mechanisms co-evolve during technological development. Through a case study of nuclear power reactor technology, it shows how learning by doing and learning by importing interact over time, revealing a “smile curve” in the evolution of technological learning.