Dr James M. Crick has won the best paper in the tourism and hospitality services track for his co-authored submission (with Professor David Crick - Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Canada) to the International Conference on Marketing, Strategy, and Policy Research. This event was hosted by Newcastle University (United Kingdom), but was held online due to the Coronavirus.

The study examined how smaller-sized restaurants in Ontario (Canada) have been sharing resources and capabilities with their competitors (forms of coopetition) to cope with the uncertainty associated with COVID-19. In this paper, the key findings indicated that by sharing such assets (e.g., information about "best practices"), firms could increase their resilience to withstand these volatile climates and boost their performance. Furthermore, by engaging in these business-to-business marketing strategies, new evidence emerged on how service-oriented organisations can pivot their business models to respond to these grand changes.

After winning this award, Dr Crick and Professor Crick have been invited to submit their paper to a highly-respected journal in the field (ABS: 3; ABDC: A - with a high impact factor).

The details of the paper are as follows.

Crick, J.M., and Crick, D. (2020). Inter-firm collaboration as a performance-enhancing survival strategy within the business models of urban restaurants affected by COVID-19. International Conference on Marketing, Strategy, and Policy Research, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom (held online).