From 5-9 September 2008 the 9th International CINet Conference was held in Valencia, Spain. The conference was a great success. A large (and growing!) number of participants came to Valencia this year and enjoyed the very good atmosphere.

One of the features of the CINet conferences is the John Bessant Best Paper Award, which was established in 1998. A committee, consisting of most of the board members went through all the papers presented at the conference. Taking into account the feedback they got from the session chairs and conference participants, they identified three outstanding papers.

The winner of the John Bessant Best Paper Award was Davide Alioni (University of Pisa) and his co-authors Antonella Martini and Luisa Pellegrini for their paper Application of Structural Equation Modeling to Evaluate a Continuous Improvement Model.

From left to right: Jaider Vega-Jurado, Jennie Björk, John Bessant and Davide Aloini.

The runners up were:

• Björk, Jennie and Mats Magnusson, Heterogeneity and Performance In Innovation Idea Network.
• Vega-Jurado, Jaider, Antonio Gutiérrez-Gracia and Ignacio Fernández-de-Lucio, The Effect of External Knowledge Sourcing and In-House R&D Activities on Firms’ Innovative Peformance. Evidence From Spanish Manufacturing Industries.

Congratulations to all!