SMJ Special Issues

Special Issues are an important part of the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ). Special Issues primarily examine emerging or important but understudied topics in the field of strategic management, which may involve new or substantial reorientation of theories, research questions, methods, or areas of empirical research.

Interested in submitting a proposal for a Special Issue? Review these Special Issue policies then email the SMS Office at smj@strategicmanagement.net.

All Special Issue manuscripts considered for submission must be sent to SMJ's online submission site. For information as to the form of submission, including style and other submission guidelines, please click here.

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Current Special Issues

Strategies for Orchestrating Innovative Solutions to Grand Challenges

Submission Deadline: July 1, 2024

Research in strategic management has been central to understanding how enterprising individuals and firms design and execute self-sustaining innovative solutions within markets to address socioeconomic needs. Within market-based economies, firms are the traditional engines of innovation, operating within the institutions created and enforced by governments to address socioeconomic needs. Such private-sector innovation has catalyzed notable advances and created positive social benefits in a range of fields including agriculture, education, energy, health, poverty alleviation, and security.
Increased attention to grand challenges has elevated the need to envision and orchestrate innovative solutions and technological adaptations for addressing them. Grand challenges are complex societal problems whose solutions are perceived to be time-urgent, critical, and impactful for addressing unmet needs in society. Today, there are at least three distinct views about the roles and responsibilities of firms, governments, and related stakeholders in orchestrating the efforts toward innovative solutions to grand challenges.

The goal of this special issue is to explore the importance and value of firms and actors operating within markets to tackle grand challenges, with a focus on the strategic orchestration of innovative solutions. We encourage theory-driven or theory-building submissions that provide robust and rigorous empirical evidence about these themes. We welcome deductive, inductive, or abductive studies using quantitative or qualitative data. Purely conceptual and theoretical papers are out of scope of the special issue.

Past Special Issues Awaiting Publication

Resource Allocation and Strategic Management

Resource allocation is a fundamental element of strategic management – whether at the corporate level, business level, or functional level; whether in an established firm or a new firm; whether in the context of a defined competitive environment or an emerging one. Despite its importance, the topic is remarkably understudied. Even when it is examined, resource allocation is often in the background of studies on other strategy topics, or invoked in a general sense, but not the focus of articles. Treating resource allocation as a background feature both underplays its importance and impedes learning about this critical management function. Treating resource allocation in broad terms oversimplifies the specific choices facing managers.

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SMJ Online Journal Access

SMS Journals are published in partnership with Wiley, and articles can be found on the Wiley Online Library. SMS Members receive complimentary access to all SMS Journal articles.