Friends of Strategy Science,
Next month, August 5th through August 8th, we (Jay Barney and Todd Zenger) will be hosting the Utah Strategy Summit at Deer Valley, Utah, with primary sponsorship from Strategy Science, the Lassonde Social Entrepreneur Program at the University of Utah, and the ION Management Science Lab at Bocconi, with additional support provided by those listed later in this note. While we are unable to invite the entire strategy community to this event, all sessions will be available via a live-streaming link at the Utah Strategy Summit website, and the various plenary sessions will be recorded and posted to our website soon after they occur.
We also want to issue an open call for journal quality submissions, focused on the central themes of the conference for consideration at Strategy Science. Depending on the volume of accepted submissions, the journal will publish one or more Special Issues on the themes of the Summit. We will also be generating an edited volume on the Summit themes, and we invite your submissions for consideration at this publication as well. The deadline for all these submissions is June 30, 2025.
Our field has a history of summits. A first summit was held in 1977 at the University of Pittsburgh-an event that proved instrumental in the founding of the Strategic Management Society and its affiliated journal. A second summit in Napa, California in 1990 helped define central research questions for the field and clarified the role of strategic management in business school research and teaching.
It has now been 34 years since that last summit, and our field has evolved dramatically. Now seems an opportune time to reflect on the field's evolution and consider how it should evolve going forward. The Utah Strategy Summit is organized around ten motivating questions:
- Some would argue that the core strategy course has not fundamentally changed in decades. What needs to change?
- What should strategic management's dependent variable be?
- What does strategic management look like if it took stakeholders seriously?
- How is strategic management useful in a world of Knightian uncertainty?
- How do we link theory and practice in strategy?
- How far can we push toward causal identification in a field focused on novelty, uniqueness, and complementarity?
- How will artificial intelligence reshape the practice of strategic management?
- The firm, the transaction, the business model, resources, the network, the ecosystem, the platform-is the proliferation of units of analysis healthy or unhealthy for the field?
- What does strategic management have to say about grand social challenges?
- What does the new industrial strategy mean for strategy?
For each of these themes we have selected panel leaders, who have in turn selected panelists. Both panel leaders and panelists will share their thoughts on these important themes. We hope you will tune in to any or all sessions that sound of interest and consider developing your own thoughts for a journal quality submission to Strategy Science or a chapter of an edited volume. For more information on the Summit visit the Utah Strategy Summit website.
In addition to Strategy Science, the Lassonde Social Entrepreneur Program, and the ION Management Science Lab at Bocconi as lead sponsors, support for the conference has been provided by the University of Utah; the Goff Strategic Leadership Center at the University of Utah; NYU Stern's Center for the Future of Management; Sorenson Impact Center at the University of Utah; University of Utah's Division of Quantitative Analysis of Markets and Organizations; Sorenson Center for Discovery & Innovation Studies at the University of Utah; Utah's Center for Business, Health and Prosperity; the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto; and Said Business School at Oxford University.
We hope you will join the live-streaming of this event, and more generally engage with us on these important themes for the field. |
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