21 December 2020 – Information Systems PhD student Ahmad Asadullah won the Kauffman Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2020.
The award recognises innovative research on information systems that are related to entrepreneurship. The winner of the award receives a cash prize of USD$1,500, sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman foundation.
To be eligible for the award, papers had to be accepted for ICIS 2020, and have a student as the sole (or primary) author.
Asadullah won the award for the paper titled ‘Can Digital Platforms help SMEs Develop Organizational Capabilities? A Qualitative Field Study’. Provost’s Chair Professor Atreyi Kankanhalli and former NUS Computing Assistant Professor Isam Faik are the co-authors of the paper.
The paper outlines how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can benefit from resources provided third-party digital platforms.
“We conducted a qualitative field study of retail SMEs on a major e-commerce platform, identifying key learning mechanisms for them to develop operational and dynamic capabilities,” said Asadullah.
He cites the support of his co-authors as one of the crucial factors that led to this achievement.
“They helped translate my dreams into reality, by shaping my research ideas and encouraging me to strive towards doing high quality research,” said Asadullah.
He added: “This immense recognition means a lot to me. It will always be remembered as a major achievement in the course of my PhD programme. I’m very grateful for all the support I received at NUS Computing – this achievement is not only mine, but ours.”
