Center for Global Business Awards 2020 PhD International Research Award

Ha Le, a second-year MBA student at Maryland Smith, writes about the PhD International Research Award.

The Center for Global Business (CGB) at Maryland Smith announced that Audra Wormald, a PhD candidate in the department of management and organization, has received the 2020 PhD International Research Award. The award is funded by CIBE, a Title VI grant provided by the U.S. Department of Education to support research in international business.

Now in its seventh year, the award supports PhD candidates doing research on international topics. An important goal of the center is to encourage PhD candidates to do research in global business and offset the significant costs that such research often entails through this award. In regard to this year’s award to Wormald, Kislaya Prasad, academic director of the center, exclaimed that “this research has the potential to have a significant impact and will further our understanding of the roles that startups play in global industry emergence and growth.”

Wormald joined the University of Maryland’s PhD program in fall 2016. Her research seeks to understand several persistent questions within strategy and entrepreneurship related to market creation in industries and countries characterized by high uncertainty. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Wormald worked at Berkeley Research Group, an economic and litigation consulting firm in Washington, D.C.

“The majority of theorizing in economics, strategy, and international business literature view new industries as emerging in developed countries and then diffusing, or trickling down, to developing countries. Reinforcing this view, the empirical settings of almost all scholarly work on industry emergence is in developed country contexts. However, this view is coming into question,” Wormald said about her research. “With the advent of the digital age, scholars have shown that cross-country differences in technology usage lags between developed and developing countries are much smaller for digital age technologies such as the Internet or cell phones than for older technologies such as cars or electricity. In terms of human capital, “argonauts” — developing country nationals seeking education and experience in developed countries who then return home — can spread organizational, technical, and institutional knowledge. There is a need to revisit the underlying premise that the resources and capabilities necessary for firms to internationalize and thus diffuse the industries they are a part of are only available in developed countries,” she shared.

Learn more about the PhD International Research Award on the center’s website.

This award was supported in part by CIBE, a Title VI grant provided by the U.S. Department of Education.