SMS

Online Extension

This SMS Extension will be hosted on October 23 from 14:00 to 19:00 UTC on Zoom provided by SBS. 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. 

Collaborating for Management Innovation: Lessons and Opportunities

Friday, October 23, 2020
14:00 - 19:00 UTC

Sponsor

Taken together, the structures, systems, and processes of management constitute one of humankind’s most important social technologies. What we can accomplish as a species is delimited in large part by the methods and tools we have for organizing human activity at scale. Over the centuries, advances in management have made a substantial contribution to economic and social progress, and today, with organizations facing an array of unprecedented challenges, the need for management innovation is more urgent than ever.

Hence the question that animates this SMS London Extension:
What could scholars do to help dramatically accelerate the pace of management innovation across the world?

Management scholars have long played an important role in pioneering new management concepts and practices. Notable contributors have included Mary Park Follett, Elton Mayo, Douglas McGregor, Eric Trist, Edgar Schein, Edwards Deming, Michael Hammer, Peter Senge, Michael Porter, C.K. Prahalad, and Henry Chesbrough. Beyond this are hundreds of other scholars whose work has appreciably enhanced organizational effectiveness. Despite these successes, management research often fails to yield a practice dividend. Few practitioners, it seems, regard academic researchers as indispensable partners in addressing the most vexing challenges that confront their organizations. In most organizations management innovation receives much less strategic and systemic attention than technological innovation despite the fact that the former often underpins the latter. One telling data point: while in a recent year, businesses spent more than $3.5 billion funding scientific research in U.S. universities, management research attracted a scant $51 million of corporate funding.

In our SMS extension we will bring together a community of academics, practitioners, and consultants to address a set of questions in keynotes, panel discussions and full group discussions.To enable interaction among participants the extension additionally relies on multiple breakout sessions which facilitate interactive discussion with key note speakers and panelists in small groups. Further registered participants will be asked to share their thoughts, insights, ideas and questions on the topic on a virtual platform in the weeks before the event. The extension will build on this input.

It will focus on the challenge of more productively engaging the scholarly community in the work of management innovation.

1. What are the bleeding edge challenges that are likely to require fundamental management innovation?
2. What do we know about how management innovation happens in practice, and how should this inform our approach to management research?
3. What are the unique contributions and capabilities that management academics can bring to the advancement of management innovation?
4. Why do corporations invest in management research?
5. What competencies are needed at companies to absorb academic concepts and recommendations for advancing management innovation?
6. What can we learn from other disciplines about how to better tackle complex, boundary‐spanning problems?
7. What could be done to foster closer research collaboration between academics, practitioners and consultants?
8. What changes in research training, professional standards, institutional incentives and corporate support would help to increase the creativity and impact of management research, and how might these changes be initiated?

Keynote Speakers & Panelists

picture of Julia Balogun
Julia Balogun
University of Liverpool
picture of Hugh Courtney
Hugh Courtney
Northeastern University
picture of Gary Hamel
Gary Hamel
London Business School
picture of Michael Mol
Michael Mol
Copenhagen Business School & University of Birmingham
picture of Martin Reeves
Martin Reeves
Boston Consulting Group
picture of Jeffrey Reuer
Jeffrey Reuer
University of Colorado, Boulder
picture of Henk Volberda
Henk Volberda
University of Amsterdam

Extension Organizers

picture of Gary Hamel
Gary Hamel
London Business School
picture of Julia Hautz
Julia Hautz
University of Innsbruck
picture of Krsto Pandza
Krsto Pandza
University of Leeds
picture of Richard Whittington
Richard Whittington
University of Oxford

Program

14:00   Introduction & Welcome
14:20   Making the Case for Radical Management Innovation
15:20   Interactive Breakout Rooms and Plenary Discussion
16:30   Virtual Coffee Break
17:00   Redesigning Management Research for Innovation and Impact
18:00   Creating the Institutional Context Breakout Sessions
18:55   Wrap-up & Farewell