Message from the STR Division Chair
2025 Spring Newsletter & Annual Meeting Highlights
Deepak Somaya, STR Division Chair
dsomayaaom@gmail.com
The STR leadership team looks forward to seeing many of you at the annual Academy of Management conference this July in Copenhagen. It will be an excitingly different experience, reflecting the increasing globalization of the Academy.
In recent years, the activities that the STR division organizes throughout the year have expanded enormously. These include virtual panels that debate and share knowledge on various topics in strategic management, online professional development and networking events, dissemination of news and content through multiple channels (including social media and podcasts), and co-sponsored workshops and conferences around the world. This letter summarizes some of the key developments in these activities, describes other administrative developments, and highlights a few of the great sessions that will be held during the in-person annual meeting.
New Strategic Plans
This year, I initiated a comprehensive review of the division's global and virtual/digital activities, respectively. The division's global activities have been operating in a manner conceived more or less at the time of their inception over a decade and a half ago, and some reevaluation was needed in light of the increasing globalization of our field and the AOM's new globally oriented strategic goals. The division's virtual/digital activities grew rapidly during and following the COVID-19 pandemic and a careful assessment was necessary to understand what we have learned about these activities and to determine what the "new normal" should look like.
Accordingly, two subcommittees were tasked with developing draft proposals for the STR Global Impact Plan and the STR Digital Plan, consisting of Executive Committee (EC) members Christina Fang and Fabrice Lumineau, and David Clough and Koen Heimericks, respectively. EC member Florence Honore reviewed the STR YouTube channel to study the organization of our content (video) library and make recommendations. Our assessments of both sets of activities suggested that although they needed some adjustments, they nonetheless played vital roles in advancing the mission and goals of the division. These initial inputs were further developed and debated to yield final versions of the Digital Impact and Global Impact plans that were adopted.
Key features of the new Global Impact Plan include a renewed focus on emerging geographies that have large unmet needs for supporting the development of strategic management scholars. Additionally, the plan calls for a STR Ambassadors program for greater reach within subregions, and a structured and enhanced approach to support more regional conferences and workshops in multiple ways. Most elements of this new plan have now been implemented in the current year.
Key features of the new Digital Impact Plan include a structured schedule for virtual sessions organized by the division, and systems and mechanisms for coordination between members of the EC and the Membership Engagement Committee (MEC) who organize these sessions. Simultaneously, the plan introduces a strong focus on service to our scholarly community as the critical lens through which these activities should be planned. It also encourages the use of our existing content library as a starting point to identify gaps and opportunities, while recognizing that many more users view recordings of the sessions than attend the sessions themselves. Finally, the plan has also led to a major restructuring of the STR YouTube library to make the content easier to search and access, e.g., through the creation of useful playlists on various topics.
2024-25 Virtual Events
After their work on the strategic initiatives described above, our non-conference team put together a great (albeit shortened) series of virtual symposia aimed to develop our members' skills and knowledge. Executive Committee (EC) members David Clough, Christina Fang, Koen Heimericks, and Florence Honore organized virtual symposia on the Foundations and Frontiers of Alliance Research (as part of the STR Meet a Phenomenon series), Strategic Management Meets Information Systems in a Digital Era (STR Conversations series), and Organizational Learning Meets Behavioral Strategy (STR Conversations series). In addition, two members of our MEC also organized great virtual sessions related to this year's theme of "Digital Meets Strategy". Cameron Miller organized a session on "Digital Transformation" as part of the STR Meet a Phenomenon series and Daniel Albert organized a session on "Generative AI as a Research Tool" as part of the STR Meet a Method series. In addition, Nathan Furr and Patricia Gorman of the STR Teaching Committee, supported by Division Chair Elect, Brian Wu, and executive committee member, Juan Santalo, also organized a virtual session on Experience-Based Learning in Strategy Teaching. All these sessions were recorded and are available from the STR HomePage (https://str.aom.org/home), as well as on the STR YouTube channel. You can also find them as podcasts. To access the sessions, simply navigate to the library tab and follow the link to our Youtube video channel.
Under the leadership of Andy Wu, the STR Membership Engagement Committee (MEC) also offered many exciting events to extend our academic conversations, support professional development and networking, and reach out to recent and new STR members. Bukky Oyedeji organized sessions on reviewing for conferences (featuring comments from Cathy Maritan), and on "Leveraging Research for Real-World Impact". Naga Lakshmi Damaraju organized a virtual event on "Navigating the AOM and Building Your Community" and held a PhD Workshop, both of which are oriented towards early career individuals and first-time attendees of AOM. Keith Pennington organized a "Strategy Jam PhD Workshop" that provided opportunities for frank discussion among current Ph.D. students. Charlotte Jacobs and Thomaz Teodorovicz organized events on "The Academic Career Around the World" and "Writing and Publishing for Non-US Scholars", which are particularly meaningful for the rapidly growing global membership of our field.
Led by Paolo Aversa, our Communications team supported the virtual events listed above, and his Communications Committee (Jingning Ao, Laura Doria, Matteo Devigili, Francesca Hueller, Giacomo Marchesini, Maria Rita Micheli, Marco Minervini, Luigi Mosca, Yixin Qiu, Yuki Yuan, and Miros Zohrehvand) did exemplary work creating and running our website, editing our videos and podcasts, uploading the above content, and advertising and promoting our events across the STR social media channels. These sessions continue to receive numerous views in the recorded versions. Please visit our homepage and our YouTube page to see for yourself all the STR Division has to offer.
I want to offer a heartfelt thank you to all our volunteers and officers for their extraordinary efforts in creating and disseminating a great virtual program.
Co-Sponsoring Strategy Conferences and Workshops around the World
Building on the STR Global Impact Plan referenced above, we have expanded our support for strategic management communities outside traditional centers of strategy scholarship. In 2024-25, we co-sponsored two regional conferences: the India Strategy Conference 2024 (held at IIM Ahmedabad, where Jeff Reuer represented STR) and the wISE ASEAN and Oceania Conference 2025 (held at Macquarie University). In addition, Marina Gama (STR Global Representative) and Thiago Soares organized an impactful virtual PDW attended by ~40 scholars from South America in November 2024.
This upcoming year, pursuant to a call for proposals, STR will co-sponsor the Chile Strategy Conference to be held at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC) from December 12 to 14, the India Strategy Conference to be held at the Indian School of Business Hyderabad from December 15 to 17, 2025, and the Winter EU-DPRN workshop 2025 to be held at the University of Belgrade, Serbia from December 4 to 5, 2025. In addition, we are also supporting the South America, Latin America, and Caribbean (SALAC) online PDW organized by STR Global Representative Marina Gama in November 2025 and are considering supporting one other locally organized conference in East Asia. These conferences and workshops represent an exponential increase in our global outreach as a division, and special thanks are due to the STR Global Representatives and other volunteers who have undertaken to organize them. The STR Leadership Team continues to welcome co-sponsorship applications for locally organized regional conferences and workshops to facilitate global networking and professional development in our field.
Administrative Highlights
The 2024-25 team advanced several changes to the STR Bylaws that were overwhelmingly approved by the STR membership. These changes are meant to strengthen processes and provide prudent guidelines for the administration of our division. The first set of changes regularized the terms served by our Appointed Officers to four or eight years with an initial apprenticeship year that overlaps with the previous appointee. Two new officers will begun their rotation under this new policy in 2025-26. In a long overdue change, the "Newsletter Committee" was renamed the "Communications Committee", and its role in managing the division's myriad communication channels was spelled out. We also clarified procedures for the appointment of Appointed Officers, and for the appointment of members in the Communications and Membership Engagement Committees. Finally, the new Bylaws also clarify that Executive Committee members need to have completed their term before being eligible for nomination as the Division's Assistant Program Chair.
We continue to make progress on policies for knowledge transfer and hand-over of tasks when new officers and volunteers step into new roles. For the elected officers, we continue to document tasks and timelines. The goal is to ease the work and ensure a robust structure for incoming elected officers. As noted earlier, we have also updated our guidelines for planning, coordinating and organizing online events. These events are vital for our community, for the development of our members and for outreach.
This year we also initiated a new policy for sponsoring some of our awards. Two of our named awards, the Outstanding Educator and the Best Dissertation award had their funding lapse, with no outstanding obligations to the foundation / publisher that initially provided the funding. Another award, the Emerging Scholar Award, has no sponsor. We launched an initiative to invite sponsorships of these three awards in the name of prominent and inactive strategic management scholars, which would serve the dual purpose of honoring these individuals and financially supporting the division's mission and goals. The sponsorship funds are to be collected by the individuals' former institutions and donated to AOM in a single tranche. Please contact the STR Division Chair if you know of worthy individuals in whose name an award can be sponsored with support from their former institutions.
The STR Division's finances are conservatively managed and feature a healthy budget surplus carried over from prior years. Like in the past few years, we started the budgeting process early in the fall, which allowed us to approve the budget early and start working with any reserves. This year, we provided significant support for important initiatives aimed at increasing access and inclusion, which included over 20 travel scholarships (an all-time record) to support disadvantaged individuals traveling to the Annual Conference. However, these costs were offset by awards and sponsorships from the Academy of Management, the University of Maryland (for the Outstanding Educator Award breakfast), and the Carlsberg Foundation (a grant kindly obtained by PDC Louise Mors), and as a result we are likely to break even again this year.
Annual Meeting Highlights
STR Assistant Program Chair, Nan Jia, has organized our pre-conference activities this year with phenomenal support from STR EC member, Catherine (Catie) Magelssen. The pre-conference program starts with the highly popular Professional Development Workshops (PDWs) and consortia on Friday until Sunday. These events provide terrific opportunities for members to learn about research questions, theories, methods, teaching tools, and professional skills that have proven useful to our membership. Several PDWs, especially our paper development workshops, have historically matched authors with expert scholars and therefore require pre-registration. Please search the AOM program, identify those sessions of greatest interest, and register for these sessions before they are fully subscribed.
In addition, the STR Division continues to offer a strong line-up of PDWs and consortia designed to bring scholars together at career stages ranging from the "Managing your Dissertation workshop" led by finalists from last year's Best Dissertation Award through to the Mid-Career Consortium. In addition, thanks to the hard work of our Teaching Committee, we will continue to deliver an increasingly popular Teaching Consortium and two teaching PDWs. the Fostering Quality Publications from Around the World Workshop organized by our Global Representatives, and several other workshops organized and submitted by our members. Make sure to consult the AOM program, the STR website (https://str.aom.org/home), or various calls for participation throughout this newsletter to learn more about the objectives and target audiences of research and teaching PDWs and consortia.
Many thanks to Nan, Catie, and all the PDW, consortia, and workshop organizers for their efforts to create an outstanding pre-conference program.
Our STR Program Chair, Isin Guler, has assembled an excellent conference program with the help of STR EC members Olga Hawn, David Tan, and Maggie Zhou. Once again, the bulk of the program will consist of symposia and competitive paper sessions, where the paper sessions are organized around eight tracks to promote dialogue and community building within individual domains. These tracks are (1) behavioral strategy, (2) nonmarket strategy, (3) resources, capabilities, and strategic factor markets, (4) strategic leadership, top management teams, and corporate governance, (5) organization structure, networks, and relational strategies, (6) corporate and international strategy, (7) knowledge, learning, and innovation strategy, and (8) industry, competition, and strategic entrepreneurship. This year witnessed not only an unprecedented number of submissions (over 1150) but also saw a new submission format-posters-all of which were managed effectively by the program team under the leadership of Isin Guler. A huge thank you goes to them and the over 1,500 reviewers who have given their time and provided developmental feedback on the many submissions in a short time frame, including our trusted emergency reviewers who worked overtime.
As you plan your conference schedule for Copenhagen, I would like to draw your attention to several notable sessions organized by STR:
STR Outstanding Educator Award Ceremony in Honor of Rajshree Agarwal
Sunday, 9:30 - 10:30 am, Bella Center: MR181
Please join us in honoring Professor Rajshree Agarwal of the University of Maryland as the 2025 STR Outstanding Educator Award winner. The 2025 award recognizes Rajshree for her outstanding commitment to Ph.D. student education and ongoing development of junior colleagues. In this session, we will hear from some of Rajshree's former and current students and colleagues as we celebrate her dedication to Ph.D. student development.
Please join Division Chair-Elect Brian Wu and the STR Officer team for light breakfast and coffee sponsored by the STR division and the University of Maryland between 8:30 and 9:30 am at Bella Center: Hall C- C4-A. After breakfast, we will proceed to the formal event, which will begin at 9:30 am sharp.
STR Plenary Session
Monday, 9:30 to 11:00 am, Bella Center, Hall C-C1-m1 - Ground Floor
This year's plenary panel, Rajshree Agarwal, Teppo Felin, Mette Kaagaard, Eivind Kolding, Karim Lakhani, and Peter Zemsky, will discuss: "Digital Meets Strategy: Will AI and Digitalization Replace Strategic Management?"
Digitalization is everywhere and the AI revolution is here, transforming our economy and upending established ways of doing business. What does all this mean for strategic management? Is human strategy-making still relevant or will it be replaced by AI? Does strategic management need its own digital transformation? These questions will be addressed by our distinguished panel of leading scholars and business leaders. The panel begins with a motivating debate: Will AI and Digitalization make Strategic Management more or less important (and how)? We will then transition to a more nuanced discussion of the implications of AI and digital technologies for strategic management, informed by both academic thought leadership and cutting-edge business expertise.
Please join Division Chair Deepak Somaya, the STR Officer team, and our distinguished panelists for light breakfast and coffee sponsored by the STR division between 8:30 and 9:30 am at Bella Center, Hall C-C2-C - Ground Floor. After breakfast, we will proceed to the plenary session, which will begin at 9:30 am sharp.
STR Dissertation Award Finalists
Monday, 3:00 to 4:45 pm, Bella Center in Hall C- C1-m1
Please come and interact with this year's finalists for the 2025 STR Outstanding Dissertation Award. The finalists will present summaries of their dissertations and accept questions from the audience. This is a great opportunity to learn about some of the exciting new research emerging in our field. This year's finalists are:
- Joe N. Ploog (PhD from University College London), IE University, Madrid. Dissertation Title: "Three Essays on Heterogeneous Network Effects: Implications for Firms and Users"
- Camille Doche (PhD from HEC Paris), ESCP Business School, Dissertation Title: "Essays on Cooperative Organizations and Collective Resources"
- Jino Lu (PhD from University of Southern California), Washington University in St. Louis, Dissertation Title: "Three Essays on the Spillover Effects of Technological Change on Innovation Dynamics"
- Bo Yang (PhD from University of Southern California), University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Business and Economics, Dissertation Title: "Corporate Political Strategies Amidst Geopolitical Tension and Polarization"
- Hyuck David Chung (PhD from University of Michigan), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dissertation Title: "Theory of the Firm in the Platform Economy"
- Patrick Hallila (PhD from City University of London), Imperial College Business School, Dissertation Title: "Essays on Intrafirm and Interfirm Competition"
STR Business Meeting
Monday, 5:00 to 6:00 pm, Bella Center, Hall C- C1-m1 - Ground Floor
Please join us for the STR Division Business Meeting! This meeting provides information about the workings of the division, acknowledges the hard work of the many dedicated volunteers who help to run the division, congratulates conference paper award winners, reviewers, and the newly elected members of the leadership team. We will also announce our other award winners (including the winner of the Best Dissertation Award).
Our team will post a PDF of the slides presented during the business meeting to the STR website prior to the meeting (with an update including award winners after the meeting). The intent of posting this PDF is to allow anyone unable to attend the conference in person to stay up to date on STR activities.
The business meeting will be followed by the STR Social (Bella Center, Hall E- EN-B - Ground Floor).
Thank You to the Entire STR community
Throughout the past year, I have had the pleasure of interacting with so many members of STR. It has been wonderful to work with the entire STR team – our amazing and dedicated volunteers. I am grateful to all those people that took the time to share their experiences, wisdom, and learnings with their colleagues. A particular highlight for me was our return to an in-person EC Winter meeting this year; the richness and camaraderie of in-person interaction and the stimulation of hearing scholarly presentations on the Research Day that preceded the meeting had been sorely missed over the last few years.
All we do at STR would not be possible without the "backbone" of the division: Secretary, David Maslach; Treasurer, Paul Drnevich; Communications Officer, Paolo Aversa; Membership Engagement Chair, Andy Wu; and the executive committee of STR. I am also grateful to the research and awards committee for their hard work this year.
It is difficult to thank Division Chair-Elect Brian Wu, Program Chair Isin Guler, and Assistant Program Chair Nan Jia enough for all of their insights, suggestions, and fun discussions regarding how to serve the division this year. I know I cannot thank Past Division Chair Louise Mors sufficiently for all of her assistance and for sharing her experience from tireless service over the past five years. I invite all of our members to recognize Lousie for her five years of service as an STR Officer. I am personally thankful for all she has done for the division and our field. Do reach out to Louise during the annual conference to thank her for her service to STR.
I hope to see many of you in Copenhagen and invite you to reach out to me or any of the other STR officers with questions about the division.
Best,
Deepak
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STR Leadership Team 2024-25
Paolo Aversa (City U of London)
David Clough (U of British Columbia)
Paul Drnevich (U Alabama)
Christina Fang (New York U)
Isin Guler (U North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Olga Hawn (U North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Koen Heimericks (Warwick Business School)
Florence Honore (U Wisconsin-Madison)
Fabrice Lumineau (U Hong Kong)
Catherine Magelssen (London Business School)
Dave Maslach (Florida State U)
John Mawdsley (HEC Paris)
Louise Mors (Copenhagen Business School)
Nan Jia (U of Southern California)
Francisco Polidoro (U of Texas - Austin)
Juan Santalo (Instituto de Empresa)
Deepak Somaya (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
David Tan (U Washington)
Andy Wu (HBS)
Brian Wu (U of Michigan)
Maggie Zhou (U of Michigan)
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Deepak Somaya
Diane and Steven Miller Professor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Division Chair, STR Division
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