Message from the STR Division Chair
2024 Spring Newsletter & Annual Meeting Highlights
Louise Mors, STR Division Chair
str@cbs.dk
The STR leadership team looks forward to seeing many of you at the annual Academy of Management conference this August in Chicago.
Once again, it has been a busy year for the division and we have offered many virtual events to enhance the creation and dissemination of theoretical and practical knowledge regarding the strategic management of organizations. These events aim to reach our membership broadly in terms of geography, as well as stage of the academic career. This letter summarizes some of the activities the STR team has put together this year and highlights a few of the great sessions that will be held during the annual meeting in Chicago.
2023-24 Virtual Events
This year our non-conference team put together a fantastic series of virtual symposia, workshops, and conversations aimed to develop our members' skills and knowledge, as well as highlight some of the challenges and opportunities that the field of Strategic Management is facing. The bulk of this work was organized by Executive Committee (EC) members Koen Heimericks, Florence Honore, Fabrice Lumineau, Philipp Meyer-Doyle, and Richard Whittington. These events included symposia on topics like human capital and corporate strategy. The team also organized Ph.D. networking workshops addressing the needs of Ph.D. students entering the job market at various locations around the world. Finally, we ran a series of "STR: Impact and Relevance" sessions involving prominent scholars from STR that drew attention to questions related to whether and how the field of Strategic Management can generate impact and address relevant research questions. These sessions are recorded and continue to be 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. Please thank Philipp, Florence, Koen, Fabrice, and Richard for their contributions to our field.
The STR team continues to generate value for the global community of scholars. This year our Global Representative Committee once again offered several exciting regional workshops. These efforts included a PDW in South America organized by Paulo Arvate, Sandro Cabral, Marina Gama, and Thiago Soares (~42 participants), a PDW for Central and North America organized by Edgar Ramirez, Carlos Rodríguez, and Eduardo Armando (~30 participants), and the popular Fostering Publications around the World PDW that is organized in Chicago this year by Martina Pasquini and our global representatives. The division is grateful for their efforts in reaching out to the global STR community.
This year, the STR Teaching Committee also organized two highly successful virtual events. In particular, Jenny Kuan and Nathan Furr organized a session on teaching-inspired research and research-inspired teaching with Rahul Kapoor, Olga Hawn, and Jeffrey York. In addition, they hosted a virtual workshop on immersive learning with Michael Leatherby, Liz Adair, and Ithai Stern. The teaching committee was supported throughout the year by Division Chair Elect, Deepak Somaya, and executive committee member, Juan Santalo.
Under the leadership of Andy Wu, the STR Membership Engagement Committee (MEC) offers many exciting events to facilitate and extend our academic conversations and also reach out to recent and new STR members. Aldona Kapacinskaite and Bukky Oyedeji organized the sessions on reviewing for conferences workshop featuring comments from Cathy Maritan. For first time attendees of AoM, Cameron Miller organized a session on how to present at conferences, and in early July, Thomaz Theodorovicz is organizing a session on how to get the most out of large conferences like AOM. Keith Pennington is organizing multiple "Strategy Jam" sessions that provide opportunities for frank discussion among current Ph.D. students. The MEC also organized sessions aimed at practitioners: Tadgh Ryan-Charleton organized a highly attended session on policy making with David Teece and Annabelle Gawer, and Bukky Oyedeji an interesting session on community outreach.
Our Communications team supported the above virtual work. I want to offer a heartfelt thank you to Paolo Aversa and his Communications Committee (Jingning Ao, Laura Doria, Scott Johnson, Maria Rita Micheli, Marco Minervini, Luigi Mosca, Ilaria Orlandi, Yuan Yuki, Yixin Qiu, and Miros Zohrehvand) for their work creating and running our website (https://str.aom.org/home), editing our videos and podcasts, uploading the above content, and advertising and promoting our events across the STR social media channels. With their support our virtual sessions have so far this academic year (2023-2024) attracted interest from more than 2,000 people and on average we had 49 people attend the live virtual sessions. These sessions continue to receive numerous views in the recorded versions. Please visit our homepage to see for yourself all the STR Division has to offer.
Co-Sponsoring Strategy Conference in India
To support STR communities outside North America, we have a growing tradition of co-sponsoring conferences that reach out to scholars in other parts of the world. This year we have decided to co-sponsor the India Strategy Conference. This conference will take place at IIM Ahmedabad from December 15 to 18, 2024 with the theme of Strategizing in an AI Dominated World. The conference is hosted and organized by Chitra Singla and Amit Karna (IIM Ahmedabad), and Seung Hoon Lee (ISB). The proposal submission deadline for the conference is August 1st and you can find more information about the conference here: https://indiastrategy.org/2024/ . The STR Leadership Team will continue to welcome co-sponsorship applications for smaller, more intimate conferences to facilitate global networking and professional development in our field.
The Administrative Infrastructure of STR
The 2023-24 team advanced several efforts to strengthen the administrative side of our division. In the past two years we have worked on guiding policies for our appointed officers. We finalized this task and now have clear guidelines and documentation of the different roles. We also made progress on policies for knowledge transfer and hand-over of tasks when new officers are to be appointed. For the elected officers, we continued to document tasks and timelines. The goal is to ease the work and ensure a robust structure for incoming elected officers. These efforts will continue in the coming year.
In addition, we updated our guidelines for communication and tracking of online events. These events are vital for our community, for the development of our members and for outreach.
This year we started to work on sponsorship for some of our awards. Two of our awards, the Outstanding Educator - previously known as the Irwin Award - and the Best Dissertation award - previously known as the Wiley Blackwell Award - were renamed as STR awards. The funding for these awards lapsed in the early 1990s, and neither the division, nor AOM, had outstanding obligations to the foundation / publisher that initially gave the funding. The awards receive broad communication and recognition throughout our community and we have therefore been in contact with different publishers for potential sponsorship. The division is also interested in other institutions potentially funding these awards. Do contact the STR Division Chair if you know of institutions that might be interested in sponsoring an award.
As per the past few years, we started the budgeting process already in the early fall. This allows us to approve the budget early and start working with any reserves. This year we decided to spend some of this reserve on sponsorship of an international conference (the India Strategy Conference mentioned earlier) and we also increased the budget for community spending. This spending includes a social event in Chicago, and a small number of scholarships for travel to attend the annual conference. These are typically aimed at young global scholars that are unable to get funding from their institution to attend the Academy of Management conference.
Annual Meeting Highlights
STR Assistant Program Chair, Isin Guler, has organized our pre-conference activities this year with phenomenal support from STR EC member, Joanna Campbell. The pre-conference program starts with the highly popular Professional Development Workshops (PDWs) and various consortia on Friday until Sunday (August 9 to 11). 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. The Division also offers several teaching PDWs, including a walk-in "clinic" for those who have specific teaching questions for experts to answer. 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 Isin, Joanna, and all the PDW, consortia, and workshop organizers for their efforts to create an outstanding pre-conference program.
Our STR Program Chair, Brian Wu, has assembled an excellent conference program with the help of STR EC members Olga Hawn, David Tan, and Zeke Hernandez. Once again, the bulk of the program will consist of symposia and competitive paper sessions, where the paper submissions are assembled into eight tracks. 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. The sessions are organized around the tracks to promote dialogue and community building within individual domains. A huge thank you goes to the program team under the leadereship of Brian Wu and the nearly 1,300 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 Chicago, I would like to draw your attention to several notable sessions organized by STR:
STR Outstanding Educator Award Ceremony in Honor of David J. Collis
Sunday, 8:30 - 9:30 am, Sheraton, Chicago Ballroom VI
Please join us in honoring Professor David J. Collis of the Harvard Business School as the 2024 STR Outstanding Educator Award winner. The 2024 award recognizes David for his outstanding commitment to MBA / Executive Education in Strategic Management. In this session, we will hear from some of David's former students and colleagues as we celebrate his dedication to MBA and Executive Education.
STR Distinguished Scholar Award Ceremony in Honor of David J. Teece
Sunday, 9:30 - 10:30 am, Sheraton, Chicago Ballroom VI
Please join us in honoring Professor David J. Teece of the University of California, Berkeley as the 2024 STR Distinguished Scholar Award winner. The STR Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes an individual who has developed a set of ideas that fundamentally advanced research and understanding in the field of strategic management. In this session, we will celebrate David's distinctive contributions to the field.
Please join Division Chair-Elect Deepak Somaya, the STR Officer team, and the career award winners for a light breakfast and coffee session sponsored by the STR division 7:30-8:30 am. The formal event will begin at 8:30 am.
STR Plenary Session
Monday, 8:30 to 10:00 am, Sheraton, Chicago Ballroom IV
This year's plenary panel, Gary Hamel, Guoli Chen, Margarethe Wiersema, Russell Coff, and Sarah Kaplan, will discuss, "The impact and relevance of strategic management research."
As Scholars we are called upon to demonstrate how our research creates impact and has relevance. The distinguished panelists will discuss what it means to have impact and generate relevant research. The plenary will also address how to ensure that future research in the field of strategic management has impact and is relevant. Our goal is to help all of our members consider how their research can not only contribute to the field of strategic management, but also have broader impact.
Please join Division Chair Louise Mors, the STR Officer team, and our distinguished panelists for a light breakfast and coffee session sponsored by the STR division between 7:30 and 8:30 am. The plenary session will begin at 8:30 am.
STR Dissertation Award Finalists
Monday, 3:00 to 4:30 pm, Sheraton, Chicago Ballroom IV
Please come and interact with this year's finalizes for the 2024 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 from our field. This year's finalists are:
- Sukhun Kang, University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD from London Business School), Dissertation Title: "Essays on Innovation Commercialization."
- Amisha Miller, New York University, Stern (PhD from Boston University, Questrom), Dissertation Title: "Changing the System, Not the Seeker: How Do Investment Organizations' Evaluation Practices Shape the Demographic Diversity of Innovators Funded?"
- Michael Park, INSEAD (PhD from University of Minnesota, Carlson), Dissertation Title: "Essays on the Politics of Innovation."
- Xiaoli (Shirley) Tang, Bocconi University (PhD from Washington University, Olin), Dissertation Title: "The Transparency Dilemma: Competition, Innovation, and Organizational Performance with Corporate Transparency."
- Daniel H. Wilde, Indiana University, Kelley (PhD from University of Pennsylvania, Wharton), Dissertation Title: "Cognitive Microfoundations of Industry Foresight and Strategic Commitments: Evidence Within the Global Automotive Industry."
STR Business Meeting
Monday, 4:45 to 5:45 pm, Sheraton, Chicago Ballroom IV
Please join us for the STR Division Business Meeting! This meeting provides information about the workings of the division, acknowledges the hard work of 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 video of the content presented during the business meeting to the STR website prior to the meeting. The intent of posting this data is to allow anyone unable to attend the conference in person to stay up to date on STR activities. This year we will also broadcast short quotes from past division chairs as they reflect on the importance of strategic management research.
The business meeting will be followed by the STR Social (in Chicago Ballroom VI).
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. In addition, it has been fun to participate in and learn from all the people in our online sessions. I am grateful to all those people that took the time to share their experiences, wisdom, and learnings with their colleagues. One session turned out to be particularly memorable for me. Not necessarily because of the content of that session, but because one of the participants shared with me why I had seen him at so many of the online sessions: This was the easiest way for him to stay connected with other strategy scholars and also get easy access to high quality content. His feedback made the entire year worthwhile. I do hope that we will continue to reach the many STR members that may not have easy access to research seminars or conferences.
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 Deepak Somaya, Program Chair Brian Wu, and Assistant Program Chair Isin Guler 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 Michael Leiblein sufficiently for all of his assistance and for sharing his experience from tireless service over the past five years. I invite all of our members to recognize Michael for his five years of service as an STR Officer. I am personally thankful for all he has done for the division and our field. Do reach out to Michael during the annual conference to thank him for his service to STR.
I hope to see many of you in Chicago and invite you to reach out to me or any of the other STR officers with questions about the division.
Best,
Louise
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STR Leadership Team 2023-24
Paolo Aversa (City U of London)
Joanna Campbell (U Cincinnati)
Paul Drnevich (U Alabama)
Aline Gatignon (U Pennsylvania)
Isin Guler (U North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Olga Hawn (U North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Koen Heimericks (Warwick Business School)
Zeke Hernandez (U Pennsylvania)
Manuela Hoehn-Weiss (Oregon State)
Florence Honore (U Wisconsin-Madison)
Michael Leiblein (Ohio State U)
Fabrice Lumineau (U Hong Kong)
Dave Maslach (Florida State U)
Philipp Meyer-Doyle (INSEAD)
Louise Mors (Copenhagen Business School)
Juan Santalo (Instituto de Empresa)
Deepak Somaya (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
David Tan (U Washington)
Richard Whittington (Oxford)
Andy Wu (HBS)
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Marie Louise Mors
Professor
Copenhagen Business School
Frederiksberg
+4538154262
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