This SMS Extension will be hosted on November 2 from 14:00-19:00 UTC on Zoom. Registrants for the extension will be emailed information about how to participate in the event in early October.
Registration for the extension will be $15 USD.
Over the last several years, the business and management literature has been grappling with questions related to digital technology adoption/diffusion, and its implications for business models, organizing, and competition. Digital technology is not precisely identified by one technology but by several technologies—for instance, it is manifested in high degrees of connectivity (often referred to as IoT), and in the ability to collect and mobilize vast amounts of data using machine learning (often called AI or artificial intelligence).
Bailey et al. (2019) in Organization Science notes that the digital technologies are quite unlike previous technological waves of the last 100 years. Digital technologies, individually and collectively, do much more than “informate and automate”, they transform the way organizations are designed, and interact with each other, and with consumers and society generally. This transformation requires management scholars to develop new theories and frameworks.
To-date, much has been written in strategic management, economics, and specialist IS journals concerning the first items on the agenda: the effect of digital on automation and the consequences of greater connectivity. However, relevant to this proposal, little has been written about the managerial challenges posed by collecting vast amounts of data internally and externally, and mobilizing that data in a myriad of ways that alter the way we design organizations, govern organizations, and the way these organizations compete. And underneath all these challenges there is an even bigger cognitive challenge, how should we frame managerial problems and solve them.
This extension will focus on a specific digital technology—Artificial Intelligence—with the goal of taking stock on four specific areas of research: Organizing, Governing, Competing, and Thinking, representing the four dominant strands of strategic management. And when we take stock, we will be addressing: how the changes influence our theorizing about the issues, what this theorizing means for practitioners, and what this theorizing means for the way we conduct our research.
14:00 - 15:00 UTC
AI and Business Model Transformation
Chair: Christopher Tucci
Panelists: Ron Kalifa, Costas Markides, and Ivanka Visnjic
This panel will examine the organising agenda, and explore issues such as the impact of AI on value creation (e.g., opening up the boundaries of the organisation) and value capture.
15:00 - 16:00 UTC
AI and Corporate Governance
Chair: Igor Filatotchev
Panelists: Ruth Aguilera, Keith Brouthers, Didier Cossin, and Evangelos Syrigos
This panel will discuss various challenges that AI presents for traditional governance practices, including questions on what can we govern and how can we secure efficient governance.
16:30 - 17:30 UTC
Cognition: Managerial frameworks for the age of AI?
Chair: Charles Baden-Fuller
Panelists: Annabelle Gawer, Erik Ranschaert, Yuliya Snihur, and Chris Williams
This panel will examine how managers need to think differently when exploiting AI capabilities and how (in our research) we should model organisations and their decision makers in the age of AI.
17:30 - 18:30
AI and Diversification
Chair: Gianvito Lanzolla
Panelists: Shaz Ansari, Quy Huy, Costas Markides, Elena Novelli, and Bart Vanneste
This panel will examine how our notions of diversification might be altered by the mobilizing of AI, including the topic of industry convergence and the scope for unrelated diversification.
18:30 - 19:00 UTC
Conclusion by the Extension Organizers
