SMS Special Conference in Oslo

This track invites submissions that address the various mechanisms firms utilize to accelerate innovation and to start up and scale up businesses in the connected world. Improved communication and adoption of shared standards facilitate capital asset “sharing,” but also break down barriers to entry, reduce asset specificity, increase global asset utilization, and otherwise disrupt existing activities. As new technologies are introduced at an ever-faster pace, constraints to startup creation, growth and survival are even more significant. We particularly welcome submissions investigating innovative strategies for sharing financial, informational, and capital assets in the processes of innovation and/or entrepreneurship, including, but not restricted to, analyzing business model innovation, networked innovation, technology-enabled service innovation, the networked character of entrepreneurial venturing processes.

Technology may be necessary but is rarely sufficient to produce effective sharing and collaboration. Supporting organizational arrangements are also needed. Unfortunately, conventional hierarchical organizational forms typically hinder rather than enable sharing. New organizational arrangements are emerging—promising to mitigate such issues within and across organizational boundaries. Crowds, communities, consortia, temporary organizations, and partnerships enable sharing with external parties. Matrix and network structures, communities of practice, various forms of self-organization are attempts of the same within organizations. In this track, we invite analyses of questions such as: Which organizational mechanisms can enable sharing within and across organizational boundaries? How can organizations stimulate sharing and safeguard against opportunism and appropriation risks? How can organizations incentivize sharing? What is the role of technology in enabling sharing? What are the matching organization’s arrangements needed to realize the sharing potential in the technologies? How do actors form and design collaborative strategies in temporary organizations? How does relational coordination affect organizational design and effectiveness? How does sharing influence organizational adaptiveness and resilience?

Sharing strategies are of particular relevance to global strategy scholars. Global firms are arguably connectors in and of themselves but face challenges in sharing knowledge and best practices between home and host countries, organizing and managing their activities in global value chains, and leveraging advantages across countries. The conference theme inspires us to rethink the global companies connecting and sharing characteristics both on a micro level between its activities, but also on a macro level among countries concerning e.g. technologies and CSR strategies. We welcome submissions on organization and strategy operating in a connected global world. This includes, but are not limited to, cross-border corporate or business strategies, headquarter-subsidiary relationships, foreign entry and operation, and organization and location strategies.