In the 2011 film Moneyball, Brad Pitt plays Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, a man forced to compete without the financial firepower of baseball’s elite franchises. His solution is to stop trusting inherited wisdom about what a “great player” looks like and start trusting the data.

At one point, Beane says, “If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.”

The line captures something uncomfortable. The system favours incumbents. Reputation lags the reality and money follows the familiar. But performance, measured carefully and honestly, can tell a different story.

The newly released Talent 100 Ranking for Business & Economics has a similar feel.

It asks a deceptively simple question. Who has generated the most sustained, high-quality, globally influential research in business and economics over the past five years?

And the answer is not what many expect.

The Difference Between Fame and Form

When most of us think of academic heavyweights in business and economics, certain names come quickly to mind.

From New York Times bestselling books and the Thinkers50, figures such as Wharton’s Adam Grant, Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson, and INSEAD’s W. Chan Kim and Renée Maubourgne are globally recognised. Their ideas shape leadership development, corporate strategy, and popular management discourse.

In economics, towering figures such as MIT’s Daron Acemoglu, Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz, and INSEAD and the LSE’s Philippe Aghion have reshaped how we understand institutions, inequality and growth. Their work is recognised at the highest levels of the discipline and has earned them the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

These are intellectual celebrities, and deservedly so. But intellectual celebrity and recent research output are not the same thing.

Teaching commitments, advisory roles, book projects, public engagement, consulting, policy influence and podcasts listened to by millions are all marks of success. Yet they inevitably dilute time for peer-reviewed research production.

The Talent 100 ranking focuses on something narrower, but arguably more measurable: publication volume, research quality, and sustained research gravitas over the past five years.

It does not measure lifetime achievement.
It does not measure media profile.
It does not measure keynote invitations.

It measures current research impact.

And in doing so, it surfaces a different cast of characters. Below is the top 10 of the Talent 100 – you can discover the full list of the top 100 here.

Top 10 of Talent 100 Ranking 2026 – Business & Economics

“Your Goal Shouldn’t Be to Buy Players…”

In Moneyball, Beane tells his scouts, “Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins.”

Translated into academia, the equivalent might be, “Your goal shouldn’t be to hire prestige. Your goal should be to hire impact.”

The Talent 100 reads, in many respects, like a scouting report built on sabermetrics rather than reputation. The individuals identified are not clustered exclusively at Harvard, Wharton, MIT or LSE. And the league table is certainly not dominated by the usual Anglo-American elite institutions.

Instead, the ranking highlights scholars at universities in Korea, UAE, Croatia and Vietnam as well as less-heralded institutions in the US and UK.

This is not an accident. It is a consequence of the metric. By focusing on recent publication performance, quality-adjusted impact, and what measuresHE describes as “research gravitas” – sustained, influential contribution rather than citation spikes – the ranking privileges form over fame.

And form, as any sports analyst will tell you, can be cyclical.

Are We Looking in the Wrong Places?

For decades, business schools have competed for faculty using a well-worn approach: recruit from the same small pool of globally prestigious institutions and assume excellence travels with pedigree.

That assumption has been reinforced by institutional rankings, journal lists, and reputational surveys. It has created feedback loops in which visibility reinforces visibility.

But what if the underlying distribution of research impact has shifted? The Talent 100 suggests that it has.

The globalisation of doctoral education, the rise of research-intensive universities across Asia, and the increasing professionalisation of publication pipelines mean that high-impact research is no longer geographically or institutionally concentrated in the way it once was.

In Moneyball, one scout insists, “He’s got a great body. He’s a five-tool guy.”

Beane replies coolly, “We’re not selling jeans here.”

Academic hiring has often rewarded institutional brand, CV aesthetics, and inherited signals. The Talent 100 challenges us to ask whether we are evaluating candidates based on visible prestige rather than measurable output.

The Geography of Impact

One of the most striking features of the measuresHE Talent 100 is its geographical spread.

Scholars based in China appear prominently, reflecting the extraordinary scale and intensity of research investment in Chinese universities over the past decade. Indian, Turkish, Malaysian and KSA institutions also feature – counties rarely positioned at the centre of global business education prestige narratives.

This matters. It suggests that research ecosystems have matured beyond the traditional transatlantic axis. It also highlights how citation networks and collaboration patterns have become more globally integrated.

In practical terms, it means that the next research star a school hires may not be sitting in Boston or London. They may be based in Shanghai, Ankara or Kuala Lumpur.

If you are only looking in familiar places, you may miss them.

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Gravitas and the Five-Year Lens

The five-year window implemented by measuresHE for the Talent 100 is deliberate. Academic reputations are often built over decades. But research momentum can be more volatile. Funding cycles, co-author networks, and emerging topics all shape output.

By focusing on the most recent five years, the ranking captures sustained publication volume and quality-adjusted citation impact to capture consistency rather than episodic bursts.

This is closer to a performance index than a lifetime achievement award, and is also closer to how universities actually compete.

When a business school or economics department claims that its faculty are “research-active” or “globally impactful”, the claim is implicitly about current output, not historical glory.

The Talent 100 gives institutions a way to identify where that current output is strongest, even if it sits outside familiar elite institutions.

Moneyball and Academic Hiring Strategy

In Moneyball, the A’s could not outspend the Yankees, but they could outthink them. Most universities and business schools are not competing with the very top global brands for the same candidates. But they are competing for differentiation.

The Talent 100 provides a potential hiring strategy for ambitious institutions:

1. Identify high-performing scholars whose recent output demonstrates sustained impact.
2. Recruit based on data-led evidence rather than inherited prestige.
3. Showcase measurable influence as part of the institution’s brand narrative.

In a world where rankings published by QS, THE and others increasingly shape student decisions and funding allocations, being able to point to faculty whose work is demonstrably cited, engaged with, and globally influential is powerful.

This is particularly relevant for schools seeking to move up research-oriented rankings. Rather than attempting to replicate elite hiring pipelines, they could leverage data to identify undervalued talent.

As Beane puts it in the film, “We are card counters at the blackjack table. And we’re going to turn the odds on the casino.”

The casino, in academia, is reputation inertia.

Are We Using the Right Measures?

Of course, no metric is neutral. The Talent 100 measures research impact within peer-reviewed scholarship. It does not capture public intellectual influence, policy advisory roles, popular management writing in publications like the Harvard Business Review. 

Nor does it attempt to. This is not a critique of thought leaders who straddle academia and practice. On the contrary, their broader influence is often immense.

But if the question is narrowly framed – who has generated the most sustained, high-quality academic research impact in the past five years? – then the answer may not align with public visibility.

The ranking therefore forces a useful distinction between influence within scholarly ecosystems and influence within public and corporate discourse. Both matter, but they are not interchangeable.

The Universities Behind the Talent

Another striking outcome of the Talent 100 is what it does for the institutions represented. For universities in China, South East Asia and the Middle East, and less-heralded US and UK schools, the ranking provides validation of research investment strategies and evidence of global citation reach.

In recruitment, fundraising and international partnerships, being able to demonstrate that faculty are among the top 100 globally in recent research impact is a compelling signal.

It also complicates simplistic narratives about global research hierarchies. Excellence is not the exclusive preserve of a handful of brandname schools.

The Risk of Ignoring the Data

In Moneyball, the old guard resists Beane’s approach. They trust intuition, tradition and aesthetic judgement. Academia is not baseball, but it is not immune to similar dynamics.

Hiring committees rely on institutional pedigree and advisor lineage, reinforced by familiar journal lists and network endorsements. All of these have value, but they can also obscure emerging performance.

The Talent 100 suggests complementing qualitative judgement with systematic evidence. If the data indicates that impact is more globally distributed than reputational hierarchies imply, then ignoring that data is a strategic choice.

A Different Story of Impact

The Talent 100 is, in effect, a mirror. It reflects where academic research impact in business and economics has actually been concentrated over the past five years. And that reflection diverges, in important ways, from the mental image many hold of the discipline’s power structure in the corridors of University of Chicago, MIT and LSE. 

It shows that geographic diversity of excellence is real and impact is measurable, if you are willing to look.

In the final moments of Moneyball, Beane is offered a lucrative job with the Boston Red Sox. He turns it down. The point was never to mimic the giants, but change how the game was understood.

The Talent 100 does something similar for business and economics scholarship. It does not dethrone intellectual celebrities. Nor does it diminish the broader societal impact of high-profile thinkers.

But if we want to identify current research impact, are we looking in the right place? For universities seeking to recruit, for business schools seeking differentiation, and for policymakers seeking evidence of global knowledge production, that question is strategic.

And as Billy Beane discovered, sometimes the competitive advantage lies not in spending more, but in seeing differently.

About the author

Matt Symonds is Chief Editor of BlueSky Thinking. He is the S of QS, co-founding QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publishers of the QS World University Rankings and numerous business school rankings.

In 2010 Matt was the media consultant for Times Higher Education to support the launch of their own THE World University Rankings, and has subsequently worked for THE and WSJ for business school rankings.

Matt writes about Higher Education and management for BBC, Times of India and formerly Forbes, The Economist and Bloomberg.

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