SMJ Special Issues

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.