Dear Friends of the Strategic Management Review,
We hope this note finds you well this summer, and we look forward to interacting with many of you at the upcoming 2024 Academy of Management or Strategic Management Society meetings.
As you may recall, we launched the Strategic Management Review a little over four years ago with a very specific positioning in relation to other academic journals in the field or adjacent ones.
Our goal is to ensure that strategic management research remains relevant and impactful into the future. The Strategic Management Review serves as a platform for insightful research that addresses canonical problems in strategic management, navigates frontier research topics in light of the field's historical core, and illuminates the opportunities and challenges faced by senior executives in strategic decision-making. We foster research on canonical problems by supporting impactful, conceptual research. We foster learning from practice through the active involvement of our Business Practice Advisory Board, conferences featuring prominent executives and consultants, and Perspectives from Practice contributions. Additional information on our aims and scope is available at https://www.strategicmanagementreview.net/ and our LinkedIn page here. We invite all members of the strategic management community to join us in advancing the frontiers of strategic management and engage in rigorous discourse that influences both academia and practice.
With this annual letter, we would like to update you on some of our recent activities and events. In particular, we would highlight the following activities and accomplishments of the past year:
- In late 2023, we published V4N2, an issue that included contributions from Arnaldo Camuffo (Bocconi), Alfonso Gambardella (Bocconi), and Andrea Pignatoro (Ion Group) regarding the impact of digitalization on firms in general and the framing of strategic decisions, in particular; Jenny Kuan (California State, Monterrey and U of North Carolina) and Gwen Lee (U of Florida) contribute to the digital discussion by adding the concept of information privacy to discussions of platform governance; Steve Tallman (Richmond) and Oded Shenkar (Ohio State) address a classic question regarding the roles of culture and strategy and argue for a more nuanced notion of the importance of culture in forming robust strategies; and Kathy Harrigan (Columbia) revisit our understanding of strategy for businesses facing declining demand given the new opportunities for customization in the internet era.
- In August of 2023, we partnered with Martin Reeves of the Boston Consulting Group's (BCG) Henderson Institute to convene a meeting of prominent academics, Chief Executive Officers and Chief Strategy Officers, and BCG partners to identify the most important "untamed issues" in strategic management. Among other interesting discussions and roundtables was a fireside chat with Don Allan (CEO of Stanley Black & Decker). We will follow up on this event with a follow-on effort this September.
- In the fall of 2023, we held a special conference on the role of collaborative strategies in the digital age with the help of Fabrice Lumineau (Hong Kong) and Arvind Malhotra (North Carolina). A group of scholars met during the conference to discuss the changes brought on by the digital age and use these observations to advance and refine theories of inter-organizational collaboration.
- In early 2024, we published a double-issue honoring the contributions of Edith Penrose and suggesting new research opportunities on the theory of the growth of the firm. We thank Peter Buckley (Leeds) and Jose de la Torre for leading this effort. This issue includes contributions from both Peter and Jose as well as Angela Penrose that reflect on Edith Penrose's remarkable contributions; Jason Pattit (St. Thomas), Katherina Pattit (St. Cloud), and JC Spender (Kozminski) provide a detailed account of unremarked upon linkages between Professor Penrose's research and the work of Frank Knight; Ram Mudambi (Temple) and Tim Switch (St. Josephs) develop an analytical model integrating Professor Penrose's work with agency theory; Christos Pitelis (Oxford) assesses and integrates key ideas from Professor Penrose with those of Stephen Hymer regarding the growth of the multinational enterprise; Peter Buckley provides an independent contribution highlighting Professor Penrose's unique take on the nature of the multinational firm; Nianchen Han (Nanyang) and Tony Tong (Colorado) highlight Professor Penrose's contributions to work on international patenting and propose a link that effective patenting systems facilitate the use of resources affecting firm growth; Ben Gomes-Casseres (Brandeis) update Professor Penrose's theory to assess the use of alliances and ecosystems in the digital economy, as well as Yasemin Kor (Cambridge), Joseph T. Mahoney (Illinois), and Danchi Tan (National Chengchi University) discuss under-explored insights associated with Professor Penrose's work and use these insights to propose a series of topics that merit future research attention
- In the coming months you will see V5N3 in print, which will include contributions by Dovev Lavie (Bocconi); Carsten Pedersen, Thomas Ritter, and Torben Anderson (Copenhagen Business School); and Trey Cummings (John Hopkins) and Jackson Nickerson (St. Louis U.). This issue will also feature a Perspective from Practice essay on innovation from William Coyne (Sr. VP of R&D at 3M) and the late Andy Van de Ven (Minnesota).
- We are currently not on journal "lists" but we will be in the future and are currently tracking the impact of our articles. We are finding that our citation impact is tracking comparably to other strategy outlets having different positioning. While we have been in existence for a very short period of time, several papers have garnered more than one hundred citations, and the per capita citations per year of many papers are strong.
- In the coming months, we will also be publicizing information on several creative events we will be holding in Europe and the US.
We hope you will continue to find the SMR to be a valuable outlet to develop and publish ideas that matter for strategic management research. We plan to be in person at the AoM and SMS and look forward to chatting with you about ways in which the Strategic Management Review might help advance the field. We have a substantial pipeline of papers and flow of new manuscripts, but we always welcome new submissions, and we would be glad to talk with you about other opportunities to partner with us. Also, if you know of a colleague with a paper suitable for the SMR, we'd appreciate you encouraging them to submit to our journal or referring them to us. We hope to see you in Chicago or Istanbul to hear any creative ideas you might have.
In closing, we welcome your involvement and thank you for your engagement and support these past few years.
Best,
Michael Leiblein & Jeff Reuer
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Sandip Bisui
Assistant Professor of Strategic Management
Daniels School of Business, Purdue University
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