Position at IIB, other positions and academic career

Jelena is an Assistant Professor of International Business and Strategy at the WU’s Institute for International Business. She earned her doctorate with honors at WU Vienna, for which she received the Stephan Koren Award 2021 for the best WU dissertations, and was a finalist for the 2021 Peter J. Buckley and Mark Casson Best Dissertation Award (award for the best dissertation in the field of International Business worldwide by the Academy of International Business). During her doctorate, she also finished the Regional Academy of the United Nations, where she won the award for the best student of the year, as well as the Ban Ki Moon Global Citizen Award. She graduated from the Erasmus Mundus EGEI Master’s program in Economics with studies in China, Belgium, and Italy as a scholarship holder of the European Commission. Earlier she completed both of her Bachelor’s degrees (in Economics and International Relations) in Belgrade, Serbia, where she is originally from.

Before joining academia, she gained considerable industry experience as a business development manager and a strategy consultant in international companies with headquarters in Germany, Austria, and the USA and she was a co-founder and CEO of the NGO Teach for Serbia, part of Teach for All global network. Before joining the IB Institute, Jelena already worked at WU as a Program Manager for CEE and Emerging Markets, as well as a lecturer for CEMS Master’s program. She speaks English, Serbian/Croatian, German, and Spanish, and has a high level of understanding of Russian and Czech. She lived in seven countries and accumulated substantial international experience.

Research interest

Her main domains of research are decision-making and behavioral strategy in MNCs (primarily focusing on the role of AI, digitalization, cognition, and heuristics in innovation selection and decision-making), headquarters-subsidiary relations, and IB research methods (especially laboratory and field experiments). Her research has been published in highly ranked international journals, such as the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of International Management. She is a Vice President - Communications & Social Media of the Research Methods Special Interest Group of the Academy of International Business.