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What a year! And what a fantastic opportunity to not only "Broaden our Sight" through all of the research sessions at the annual AOM conference, but also broaden the way we normally do academy.  No rushing from hotel to hotel to catch sessions from different divisions this year and you do not actually have to wear shoes or pants (please be mindful of your webcam angles!). 

The 2020 Virtual AOM Annual Meeting is being held from August 7-11^th from anywhere and everywhere.  All times listed in this newsletter are Eastern Time to maintain consistency (and because that is my base time zone).  Every effort was made to schedule live sessions so that authors/presenters are not up in the middle of the night, but there will be some sessions that are not convenient, given the wide geographic expanse of our STR membership.  All main program sessions will be recorded, so you will be able to access those interesting sessions that might happen in the middle of the night in your time zone.   

STR Virtual Program:

For the synchronous, real-time August program, the STR officers agreed that it made the most sense to limit the live STR offerings to the top rated papers and symposia, in addition to offering the plenary, the dissertation finalist presentations and some form of the business meeting.  Historically, STR has organized its sessions using eight topic tracks and STR will continue to use these tracks to organize the virtual offerings.  There will be two sessions offered within each of the eight tracks – one session that will have the four "best papers" from the track and one session that will have one of the top rated "showcase" symposia from the track.  We will also offer three social events across Monday and Tuesday, during times that will be evening hours in either the US, Europe or Asia. 

See below for a summary of the 2020 STR Synchronous Main Program Offerings (and all times are in Eastern Time zone in this summary).  There is also a PDF version of the STR synchronous offerings in the STR library in case the table formatting doesn't line up on your device. 

Plenary Session

We will kick off the main program with the STR Plenary on Monday from 9:00am-10:30am ET.  This year, STR features an exciting plenary session entitled "20/20:  Focusing on COVID's Implications for the Field of Strategic Management." The panel, will be moderated by Samina Karim (Division Chair), and is composed of an extraordinary group of scholars, including  Alfonso Gambardella (Bocconi), Gerry George (SMU), Costas Markides (LBS),  Anita McGahan (University of Toronto), Phanish Puranam (INSEAD) and Richard Whittington (University of Oxford). 

Business Meeting & Social

We will recognize various conference best paper awards at our Tuesday STR Business Meeting (from 10:00-11:00am ET). Recognition will also be given to outstanding reviewers (providing especially detailed, constructive, and timely feedback to authors) for the 2020 program.

This year, we have increased the number of STR awards.  In addition to the traditional Glueck Best Paper Award, the Litschert Best Doctoral Student Paper Award, the Ghoshal Research and Practice Award and the Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award, we will also recognize the best paper within each of our eight topic tracks.       

Program Access/Tech Support

AOM is inviting authors of all accepted papers to post videos of their paper presentation to the online platform.  All registered participants will have access to chat discussions of their presentations.  In addition, all sessions in the main program will be recorded and all registered participants will be able to access all sessions for some time after the virtual program has concluded (likely August-September).  For all synchronous sessions, AOM will provide tech support fifteen minutes prior to the start time of each session (and throughout each synchronous session).  More information will be provided from AOM as we get closer to the conference dates.    

Thank You!

The AOM program requires a massive team effort to process and there are many people I want to thank for their help with the program this year. First, I created a Program Team and used the eight STR tracks to organize the review process across myself and three members of the EC Committee.  I can't thank EC Members Ha Hoang, Aseem Kaul and Jiao Luo enough for all of their work this year! 

Second, thank you to the eight scholars who served as Track Organizers, helping to organize papers into cohesive sessions: Thomas Lindner, WU Vienna (Corporate and International Strategy Track); Georg Wernicke, HEC Paris, (Strategic Leadership and Governance Track); Anne Jacqueminet, Bocconi University (Stakeholder and Non-Market Strategy Track); Cameron Miller, Syracuse University (Competitive Strategy and Heterogeneity Track); Moshe Barach, University of Minnesota (Knowledge, Innovation and Strategic Human Capitol Track); Elena Plaksenkova, Ohio State University (Cooperative Strategy Track); Alex Wilson, University of Minnesota (Behavioral Strategy, Process, and Change Track); and Dmitry Sharapov, Imperial College (Strategic Entrepreneurship Track).

Third, thank you to all reviewers who signed up to review (1,455 reviewers from 65 different countries), especially those who completed their reviews (75% of reviews were completed).  We are deeply grateful to all of the new and continuing reviewers who gave their time and offered developmental and high-quality reviews, undertaking significant effort to serve our division in this important way. As a result of this collective effort, the majority of submissions received three reviews.

Fourth, special thanks to several people who stepped up and provided many emergency reviews in a very short period of time, including:  Arzi Adbi, INSEAD; Moshe Barach, University of Minnesota; Himanshu Bhatt, ESSEC; Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Northeastern University; Parthiban David, American University; Roisin Donnelly, Tilburg University; Heather Elms, American University; Martin HETU, HEC; Daniel Keum, Columbia Business School; Jin Hyung Kim, George Washington University; Ronald Klingebiel, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management; Denisa Mindruta, HEC; Cameron Miller, Syracuse University; Louise Mors, Copenhagen Business School; Paul Nary, U. of Pennsylvania (Wharton); Keith Pennington, University of Minnesota; Anu Phene, George Washington University; Joe Raffiee, University of Southern California; Ramkumar Ranganathan, University of Texas, Austin; Haram Seo, University of Minnesota; Jeremy Watson, University of Minnesota; and Alex Wilson, University of Minnesota. 

And finally, I would like to thank Caitlyn Leong, a graduate student at Georgetown University for her mastery of AOM's program developer and her fantastic job as Program Chair Assistant.  I would like to thank the AOM Staff, especially Gabe Bramson for all of their assistance during the past year.  And warm thanks to the other STR officers –Xavier Martin, Samina Karim, Tim Folta and Michael Leiblein for fielding all of my inquiries throughout the year. 

AOM Stats:

In closing, for those of you who are interested in the paper stats for the division, the STR division received 880 papers and 101 symposium submissions in 2020 (a record high for the division and a 6% increase over 2019 submissions) from authors representing 40 different countries, reflecting the global nature of our STR community.  44 percent of all paper submissions were accepted as either divisional (352) or discussion (32) papers, consistent with the Academy of Management (AOM) target acceptance rate.