The Executive Discoveries Series (EDS) intends to create a meaningful and impactful conversation between academics and business practitioners and consultants. The EDS Track consists of paper and common ground sessions as well as panel discussions that feature cutting-edge research coupled with provocative ideas that challenge conventional managerial wisdom and provide exposure for executives to new academic insights that can help advance their strategic insights and skills. For the SMS Annual Conference Houston, after close collaboration with the leadership teams of the SMS Interest Groups, we have identified sessions that cover a range of current managerial challenges. Below you will find an easy to navigate, virtual, EDS Track that runs through the conference program. These sessions are grouped into nine themes.
The first theme of the EDS track focuses on ecosystems, platform-based business models, and co-creating value with competitors, with a specific focus on the sharing economy. Papers in this theme study the processes and practices underlying ecosystems’ emergence and dynamic changes over time, the influence of modularization and sub-communities, and the integration of varied participants’ resources and capabilities, as well as their links to ecosystem effectiveness. Moreover, Airbnb, Blablacar, Uber, and other sharing-economy firms are analyzed to better understand potential ways of building trust and legitimizing their offerings and to identify those business model characteristics that are related to higher performance outcomes.
511: Platforms, Networks, and Ecosystems
583: Strategy in the Sharing Economy
639: Coopetition and Innovation
653: Bridging Knowledge Boundaries: New Organizational Forms
The second EDS theme focuses on incumbents and their change and adaption strategies in times of uncertainty, market and technological change, or disruptive innovation. Studies in diverse settings, from the music to the fintech industry, building on different study designs (ethnography, qualitative, and quantitative designs) examine the processes and roles of dynamic capabilities, ambidexterity, and replication strategies.
623: Managing Technological Change
630: Change and Adaptation in Knowledge and Innovation Management
This theme studies top executives responsible for making strategic decisions in organizations. One focus within this theme lies on CEO quality and how executive remuneration could be linked to value creation. Another focus lies on gender diversity and female directors’ particularities and influence on venture failure or corporate social performance.
515: Top Management and Strategy Making
567: Corporate Strategy, Leadership and Governance
590: Compensation: Antecedents and Outcomes of Incentivizing Human Capital Resources
This theme studies entrepreneurship and innovation strategies with a focus on failure, its associated costs, and its potential to trigger organizational learning, with an emphasis on the institutional setting in which entrepreneurial and innovative activities unfold. In addition, the new venture emergence process and its consequences for technology commercialization choices is studied.
599: Failure in the Entrepreneurial Context
This theme focuses on understanding Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and restructuring. The studies that are part of this theme examine the consequences of prior experience on M&A outcomes, how M&A are used to develop and (re)deploy resources and capabilities over time, the particularities of cross-border M&A, and whether and how family firms differ from non-family firms with respect to corporate strategies and outcomes.
538: Family Firms and Corporate Strategy
551: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Cross-Border Acquisitions
This theme explores how managers engage in strategy formulation and implementation amidst an organizational crisis by examining the different forums managers use for strategizing, how they make sense of their internal and external environments—including their affective reactions to organizational crises as well as their awareness of emerging competitors—and how they manage public impressions of their firms after negative news.
This theme focuses on nonmarket and political strategies in the U.S. and other developed (Europe) and developing countries (Nigeria). Studies in this theme examine both the determinants of non-market and political strategies as well as their consequences for top management and firm performance. Studies also examine the interaction between market and nonmarket strategies—e.g., the use of nonmarket strategies as competitive and uncertainty-reducing strategies—and their consequences on firm performance and social welfare.
535: Nonmarket and Political Strategies
574: Corporate Political Activities: Antecedents and Consequences
This theme focuses on multinational corporations (MNC) with an equal emphasis on their internal and external organization. Studies examining MNCs’ internal organization present new findings related to headquarters’ parenting modes, subsidiary autonomy, and subsidiary mandates. Studies analyzing MNCs’ external organization provide new insights on the determinants and outcomes of firms’ internationalization strategies, aggregation and disaggregation of global supply and value chains, on- and offshoring decisions, and global location choices, as well as the role of institutions on firms’ international strategies.
550: The “How” Of International Business Strategy: Timing, Process, and History
553: The Joys and Challenges of Parenthood: Subsidiary Management
Theme 9 focuses on intra- and interfirm labor markets. Studies in this theme examine the benefits and costs of hiring from within and outside the firm, the effects of job mobility and mobility constraints, as well as the determinants of post-merger turnover among top management and professional knowledge workers.
588: Strategic Human Capital Mobility and Turnover: Good or Bad? Discuss.
592: Labor Markets: Where and How do Firms Get Strategic Human Capital Resources?
