From 7-11 September 2007 the 8th International CINet Conference was held in Gothenburg, Sweden. The conference was a great success, in all respects. A large number of participants and a very good atmosphere. An inspiring conference to look back to with great pleasure!

One of the features of the CINet conferences is the John Bessant Best Paper Award, which was established in 1998. A committee, consisting of Harry Boer, Mats Magnusson and Terry Sloan went through all the papers presented at the conference. Taking into account the feedback they got from the session chairs, they identified two outstanding papers.

The winner of the John Bessant Best Paper Award was Eric Brun (University of Stavanger) and his co-author Alf Steinar Saetre for their paper Managing Ambiguity in New Product Development Projects. Nearly by definition, uncertainty is the key problem of innovation. There are several classes of uncertainty. Ambiguity is one of them. In their paper, Eric Brun and Alf Steinar Saetre present and discuss a model by which ambiguity can be classified along two axes, the object and the source of ambiguity. In his presentation of the best paper award to Eric Brun, John Bessant mentioned how important this paper is for managers and researchers to get a better understanding of ambiguity and how to handle it.

John Bessant handing over the award to Eric Brun.

CINet chair Mats Magnusson & Best Paper Award winner Eric Brun.

The runner up was Eric W. Hallgren (Technical University of Denmark) for his paper "How to Use an Innovation Audit as a Learning Tool: A Case Study".

Congratulations from John Bessant for runner up Eric W. Hallgren.

Congratulations to all!