The Executive Discoveries Series (EDS) intends to create a meaningful and impactful conversation between academics and business practitioners and consultants. The EDS Track at the SMS Annual Conference in Paris consisted of paper and common ground sessions as well as panel discussions that featured cutting-edge research coupled with provocative ideas that challenged conventional managerial wisdom and provided exposure for executives to new academic insights that could help advance their strategic insights and skills. For the Paris SMS Annual Conference, after close collaboration with the leadership teams of the SMS Interest Groups, we identified sessions that covered a range of current managerial challenges. Below you will find the easy-to-navigate, virtual EDS Track that ran through the conference program. These sessions are grouped into seven themes.
The first theme of the EDS track focused on ecosystems and platform-based business models. Topics in this theme ranged from how (new) ecosystems and platforms are built to which capabilities different actors need—especially incumbents and complementors—and covered the most appropriate actions for executives to respond to disruptive technologies, become ecosystem leaders, orchestrate digital ecosystems, capitalize on platforms, and hedge their strategies by getting involved in competing platforms. Empirical evidence came from a wide range of sectors including financial services, software, smart home, payment systems, video game, sharing economy, and automotive suppliers, and from firms such as Cisco, eBay, and Google.
Session 896: (Parallel Panel) Building (New) Ecosystems
Session 899: (Parallel Panel) Patterns of Digital Disruption: Insights from the Financial Sector
The second EDS theme covered sessions broadly related to the topic of innovation. A first focus lies on a better understanding and classification of inventors, breakthrough discoveries, and the role of crowds in evaluating innovative ideas. A second focus lies on international innovation and covers topics from cross-border innovation of both small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large multinational companies (MNCs), MNC innovation activities in emerging markets, the role of social norms, as well as the innovation of emerging market companies and how Western MNCs could respond. A final focus lies on business model innovation (BMI) and covers topics from a better conceptualization of BMI and its underlying sub-processes to a study of attention structure changes during BMI processes. The empirical evidence in this second theme comes from diverse settings, ranging from Dutch design firms to Swiss SMEs, and from sectors such as wireless routers, bionic prosthetics, mobile dating applications, to hydraulic fracturing and wineries.
Session 893: (Parallel Panel) Business Models in the Sharing Economy
Session 898: (Parallel Panel) Innovation in Emerging Markets and the Western MNC Response
Session 1017: (Paper) Breakthrough Innovations and Wicked Problems
Session 1053: (Common Ground) Business Model Innovation
Session 1058: (Common Ground) Market Effects on Innovation
Session 1122: (Paper) Headquarter-Subsidiary Relationships and Interactions
Session 1132: (Paper) Cross-Border Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The third EDS theme focuses on how to manage key stakeholder relationships. Topics covered in this theme include the emergence of distrust and conflict among stakeholders, legitimacy and reputation, lobbying activities, public relations, global stakeholders, and firms’ responses to stakeholder attacks.
Session 894: (Parallel Panel) State Ownership of Companies in International Context
Session 1012: (Paper) Caught in the Geopolitical Storm
Session 1013: (Paper) It’s So Hard to Get Along
Session 1014: (Paper) Unconventional Solutions to Resolving Stakeholder Conflict
Session 1039: (Paper) Crises, Scandals, and Negative Events
Session 1042: (Paper) Status, Reputation, and Legitimacy
Session 1048: (Paper) Managing Stakeholder Relationships
Session 1125: (Common Ground) Political Risks, Institutional Quality and Global Strategy
This EDS theme studies the human capital of employees and top executives responsible for making strategic decisions in organizations. One focus within this theme lies on the strategic management of the pipeline for talent within firms. A second focus lies on CEOs and develops insights into newly appointed CEOs’ compensation packages, the consequences of CEO humility, the effects of external CEO appointments on firm performance, and the impact of the political regime on CEO succession. A third focus lies on directors, more specifically on how directors are selected, the performance implications of directors sitting on multiple corporate boards, and on the determinants of directors’ willingness to dissent.
Session 971: (Paper) Director Effectiveness in International Markets
Session 973: (Paper) Strategic Talent Sourcing
Session 975: (Common Ground) Managing Human Capital: Investment and Deployment
This EDS theme centers on business-level and corporate-level strategy questions. Sessions on the former examine competitive strategies, such as imitation, first-mover advantages, responses to price wars, and the effects of private versus state ownership on competitive behavior and firm performance. Session focused on the latter examine the drivers of M&A performance, with an emphasis on the deal-making process, investments in due diligence activities, and different types of synergies.
Session 986: (Paper) Imitation
Session 987: (Paper) Competition and Growth
This EDS theme explores the linkages between entrepreneurship and strategy. The sessions that are part of this theme focus on digital entrepreneurship, new venture team homogeneity, the timing of new venture formation, and (failed) experimentation. In addition, sessions discuss linkages between startups and large, established organizations as well as the funding by incumbent firms and their impact on entrepreneurial orientation and innovative activities. The empirical context is mainly US-based and healthcare-focused.
Session 938: (IG&C Sunday) Entrepreneurship and Corporate Political Strategy
Session 1087: (Paper) Digital Entrepreneurship
Session 1088: (Common Ground) New Venture Teams
Session 1093: (Paper) Linkages Between Start-Ups & Large Firms
Studies that are part of this last EDS theme examine strategic decision makers’ attention focus, risk perceptions, and search strategies as well as the consequences of culture, tradition, and opening up the strategic decision-making process to participants from outside the executive suite or even from outside the firm.
Session 1030: (Paper) Search and Coordination
Session 1059: (Paper) Strategic Decision-Making Processes
Session 1104: (Paper) Collaborative Strategy-Making: Participation, Inclusion and Influencing
Session 1105: (Paper) Contradictions and Ambiguities in the Practice of Strategy
