Suffolk University’s Sokol Celo, PhD, recently received multiple prestigious awards at two international conferences.

The Sawyer Business School Assistant Professor of Strategy and International Business won the Temple University/Academy of International Business (AIB) Best Paper Award at the 2012 AIB international conference meeting earlier this summer.

The Academy of International Business is the leading association of scholars and specialists in the field of international business. Temple University's Fox School of Business endows an award for the best paper at the AIB Annual Meetings. Celo received the award for an article he co-authored with Ay Chacar of Florida International University.

Their winning article, titled, Country Relatedness and International Coherence, proposed an alternative approach in international business research “that relies on survivor data culled from the actions of individuals and firms to compute country relatedness,” as opposed to the conventional approach, which is “to consider and/or compute country distance as independent of individual firm actions.” In addition, the paper introduces the concept of firm’s international coherence and investigates its effects on firm performance.

The pair began the study by computing country relatedness for 24,000 public MNEs worldwide, and they confirmed their hypothesis after measuring international coherence for a sample of 1,000 US MNEs.

In addition to the AIB award, Celo was one of four finalists for the International Management Division Fundação Dom Cabral Best Paper in Strategy/International Business Theory Award at the Academy of Management annual meeting.

He also was later selected for the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, which categorizes him into the top-10 percent of submitted papers.

Celo specializes in international business, international location decisions, cognition and managerial decision-making, and institutional change and has more than 20 years of teaching experience. He teaches Globalization, an undergraduate course that introduces processes and concepts that define today’s international business environment, as well as Strategic Management, a capstone course for the undergraduate students.