The SMS Teaching Initiative was designed to provide a forum to help improve the classroom effectiveness of researchers who teach strategy. In addition to being important in its own right, helping SMS members improve their teaching effectiveness and efficiency is closely related to members’ ability to secure resources to facilitate their research mission. Therefore, Teaching Community seeks to help improve the teaching effectiveness of SMS members through high-impact sessions at the SMS Annual Conference.

The objective of our Community is to address the teaching-related needs of a significant majority of SMS members. As such, conference programming seeks to balance three characteristics that reflect the diversity of SMS members: diversity in learning objectives vis-a-vis the target student population (e.g., undergraduate, MBA and executive); diversity in teaching techniques (e.g., cases, simulations, experiential, e-learning); and, cultural diversity (in terms of both the student population and of the university location).

A second objective is to provide a forum in which members can share experiences and resources related to teaching. A reputation for consistent high-quality programming is essential to achieving this objective because the investment of time must be valuable to SMS members. The Teaching Initiative has therefore focused on maximizing the impact of its sessions through careful selection of topics and presenters.

SMS members will be invited to propose interesting sessions for the Annual Conference involving award-winning faculty and creative ideas and/or research papers that emphasize such issues as content analyses of courses, new research on strategy pedagogy, or literature reviews of prior pedagogy research. The Community’s leadership and representatives will review the submissions and have responsibility for constructing the annual program.