UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Professor David J. Teece has been named as a 2021 Citation Laureate in economics for his pioneering research on entrepreneurship, innovation, and competition.
Teece is among 16 researchers from six countries whose work was deemed to be “of Nobel class” by the Institute for Scientific Information. These researchers are among the most highly cited within the Web of Science, a global database of citations in peer-reviewed journals managed by analytics firm Clarivate.
“I’m humbled to be included with such esteemed names, and wish to thank the University of California, Berkeley, the Haas School, and the Institute for Business Innovation for providing the environment that has enabled me to flourish as a scholar-entrepreneur,” said Teece, who is the Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business, faculty director of the The Tusher Initiative for the Management of Intellectual Capital, and also the founder and executive chairman of Berkeley Research Group.
A global authority on the theory of firm and strategic management, competition policy, and intellectual property, Teece has written over 30 books and two hundred scholarly papers, and has been cited over 186,000 times (per Google Scholar).
Teece is well-known for his theory of “dynamic capabilities,” which says that what matters most for business is corporate agility, or the ability to sense new threats, seize opportunities, and reconfigure as necessary. His seminal 1997 paper on the concept has been cited almost 12,000 times in its original version, and 47,000 times in all versions.
For context, out of some 52 million articles indexed in the Web of Science since 1970, only 6,500 (or .01%) have been cited 2,000 or more times. Citation Laureates are identified and selected from among this group. “They are individuals whose research publications are highly cited and whose contributions to science have been extremely influential, even transformative,” according to Clarivate’s announcement.
“For a paper to be cited 2,000 times or more is a rarity,” said David Pendlebury, senior citation analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. “Authors of very highly cited papers are usually members of national academies of sciences, hold senior appointments in universities and other research institutes, and have received many top international prizes in their fields. Indeed, many of them have helped to shape their fields of study.”
Clarivate uses quantitative data in addition to qualitative assessment to provide insights about the world’s most influential researchers. Citation Laureates are awarded in the areas recognized by the Nobel Prize: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Economics. Since 2002, 376 researchers have been awarded Citation Laureates, and 59 of them have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize.
Teece has been a professor at the Haas School of Business since 1982. He formerly served as faculty director of the Institute for Business Innovation. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as 10 honorary doctorates.
“I cherish the atmosphere of open discussion and the ability to challenge received paradigms, which is a quintessential Berkeley trait,” Teece said. “We must all work hard to maintain these traits along with an interdisciplinary focus, and linkages between theory and practice. It is only by pursuing these goals that our frameworks, theories, and models can be both rigorous and relevant.”