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. 

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?