SMS Special Conference in Banff

This track targets papers that advance the dialogue on the value added of incorporating entrepreneurial thinking as a key building block in dynamic capabilities and strategic management research. At the heart of entrepreneurship research is the focus on ‘Schumpeterian’ innovators, their traits, behaviours and cognitive abilities, as well as their skills in translating opportunity recognition into a dynamic and colorful kaleidoscope of entrepreneurial action. Dynamic capabilities research centers on uncovering how firms continuously renew, reconfigure, realign and redeploy their resource base to achieve a better ‘fit’ with the external environment in the presence of a continuously shifting environmental landscape. The key question remains: How do organizations and managers become more entrepreneurial? A highly promising, but little explored research domain, is situated at the intersection of three streams of research, namely those of entrepreneurial thinking, dynamic capabilities development, and organizational innovation for superior performance.

As the world becomes increasingly fast moving and organizations need to become ever more responsive and flexible, the need to understand the foundations of entrepreneurial thinking and dynamic capabilities is increasingly important. Work on knowledge and innovation underpins our understanding of both entrepreneurial thinking and dynamic capabilities, as it gets at the underlying mechanisms of this work. As such, new work on knowledge and innovation can enhance our understanding of entrepreneurial thinking and dynamic capabilities in a number of
ways. Innovation and entrepreneurial thinking are similar in that they both relate to the creation of new ideas. Yet how do we bring such ideas successfully to market? Work on innovation has traditionally focused on how organizations can engender and support innovation, but this work has remained somewhat separate from work on entrepreneurship, which deals more with the implementation and commercialization of innovation. Hence, there
are opportunities to bring these two streams of research more closely together.

Understanding entrepreneurial thinking and dynamic capabilities is becoming increasingly important for studying strategies of multinationals (MNEs) – the world’s most complex entrepreneurial organizations. By adopting this lens of inquiry, scholarship on global strategy can potentially be enhanced in multiple ways. MNEs operate in multiple, heterogeneous, geographically dispersed, and rapidly changing markets, often characterized by high levels of institutional and technological complexity. Consequently, a large open question – both in the literature and in practice – remains on how the MNE can develop, upgrade and transfer home-based capabilities to host markets, and artfully recombine them with extant local resources and capabilities internally or through various institutional arrangements. Understanding the MNE’s entrepreneurial resource orchestration can help to enhance success in global operations. Further, research on reverse flows of innovation (from foreign subsidiaries to headquarters) is gaining momentum, and is offering promising areas for theoretical and practical exploration. To benefit from reverse innovation at a global scale, MNEs must foster development of subsidiary-specific capabilities, and learn to adapt, upgrade and transfer these globally dispersed capabilities to the entire MNE network.

Behavioral strategy research is based on realistic assumptions about human cognition, emotion, and social interaction. Behavioral strategic entrepreneurship research builds upon this fundamental tenet by focusing on the behavior of entrepreneurs, their organizations, and observers such as venture capitalists, the media, potential customers and the general public. The behavioral strategy track of the conference welcomes research
that explores how entrepreneurial or managerial cognition, emotion, and social interaction contribute to the development of dynamic capabilities. We welcome work that explores the “three pound universe” of the individual decision maker, designer and creator, as well as sociocognitive research that explores interpersonal processes of shared cognition and collective behavior. Research on cognition and decision making; biases, heuristics, and routines; mental models, frames, schema, and cognitive categories; reference points and risktaking; managerial goals, expectations, and perceptions; emotions, motivations, and personalities; individual and organizational learning; and the social psychology of group decision making, are all welcome. We especially wish to encourage researchers exploring the formation of dynamic, creative and design capabilities of nascent founders and firms, to submit their work.