June 25, 2018. Shanghai – CEIBS Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management Zhao Xiande is the recipient of the 2018 Emerald Literati Award for Excellence. His research work on “Analysing customer behaviour in mobile app usage”, co-authored with his postgraduate student Chen Qianling, was among those that made Emerald’s most prestigious category of Outstanding and Highly Commended Papers. The paper was only one of four from mainland China to make the list.

In addition to accolades from academic circles, Prof. Zhao’s work has practical applications. Its findings may help app developers better understand user behaviour, which could lead to improvements on existing products or even new ones. By mining users’ data collected by a mobile app, the paper identifies high value users and analyses patterns in their use of the app’s functions by employing three combinations of data analytical approaches in the way of a case study. The paper was first published in Industrial Management & Data Systems (2017[2]:425-438).

The highly coveted Literati Awards for Excellence, by world-renown academic publisher Emerald, is recognition of the most impressive pieces of work judges – eminent academics or managers – have seen throughout the past year. This year, Emerald selected 245 Outstanding Papers and 513 Highly Commended Papers globally. Papers are assessed across a range of six areas: internationality; diversity; support for scholarly research; encouragement of applied research (impact); commitment to high quality scholarship; and a desire to ensure reader, author and customer experience is the best it can be. The award aims to celebrate and reward authors’ and reviewers’ outstanding contributions to scholarly research. There were 33 Highly Commended Papers from mainland China, in addition to the 4 Outstanding Papers which includes Prof. Zhao’s work.

Prof. Zhao has earned a reputation for excellence in research, and he has made Elsevier’s list of the World’s Most Cited Chinese Researchers in Business, Management and Accounting several times. He has published about 150 academic papers and cases in internationally renowned academic journals including Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Consumer Research, Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research and International Journal of Production Research. He is also Co-editor-in-chief for Springer’s Journal of Data, Information and Management. His expertise is in the areas of Operations and Supply Chain Management. His research interests focus mostly on supply chain integration and innovation, network-based service and business model innovation, supply chain finance, digital supply chain, big-data based supply chain and logistics optimisation. He is currently working on a series of papers using big data to help optimise business decisions.

Prof. Zhao Xiande is JD.COM Chair in Operations and Supply Chain Management and Director of CEIBS-GLP Centre of Innovations in Supply Chains and Services.