Joseph T. Mahoney, Caterpillar Chair of Business at Gies College of Business and associate director of the Illinois Strategic Organizations Initiative (ISOI), has been awarded the 2025 Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize from the Strategic Management Journal.

The Schendel Prize honors work that has had lasting influence on management teaching, research, and practice. Mahoney received the award for his paper “Modularity, Flexibility, and Knowledge Management in Product and Organization Design,” co-authored with Ron Sanchez (Copenhagen Business School). Originally published in 1996, the article endures as a foundational contribution to strategic management scholarship and organizational design.

"As the 2025 recipient of the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize, my 1996 SMJ article with Ron Sanchez is particularly meaningful to me," said Mahoney. "Mary Lou Schendel exhibited a generous heart, vibrant spirit, and dedication in her duties as the executive editor of SMJ, which her husband Professor Dan Schendel founded. It was a genuine joint effort, which could not have succeeded with only one member of this remarkable pair. I am blessed to have worked with them in the formative years of my academic career."

As proved by more than 4,000 citations on Google Scholar, Mahoney's paper reframed how scholars and practitioners think about the relationship between products and the organizations that produce them. It argues that while companies design products, those products also shape the organizations themselves: the coordination tasks required by a specific product design often determine the feasible structures for development and production.

The paper also demonstrated how modular design - building products as components with standardized interfaces - can accelerate innovation, increase adaptability, and enable collaboration across distributed teams. These ideas have proven even more significant in the era of digital platforms and artificial intelligence, where modular architectures underpin technologies from cloud services to machine learning pipelines.

Mahoney’s work has had far-reaching impact, influencing research on platform governance, open innovation, and AI system design. Its core concepts continue to influence how organizations manage complexity, learn over time, and innovate at scale.

Mahoney, who joined the Gies faculty in 1988, has published more than 90 journal articles, authored the influential Economic Foundations of Strategy, and served in leadership roles across multiple scholarly organizations. He was elected a Fellow of both the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society and was named one of Poets & Quants’ Top 50 Undergraduate Professors of Business. As associate director of the Illinois Strategic Organizations Initiative, Mahoney’s scholarship reflects ISOI’s mission to advance cutting-edge transdisciplinary research on how organizations are structured, governed, and designed.

The Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize, established in 1993 by SMJ and the Strategic Management Society, is awarded annually to a paper published five or more years prior that has demonstrated enduring influence. Winners are selected by the SMJ Editorial Board and receive a $5,000 award presented at the SMS Annual Conference.