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Deadline for submissions: 31^st January 2013

The Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School invites you to submit research papers for presentation at the seventh annual Sumantra Ghoshal Strategy Conference on Managerially Relevant Research, to be held on campus on June 2^nd - 3^rd 2013.

In keeping with the spirit of the late Sumantra Ghoshal's research philosophy, our aim is to invite research presentations that not only meet the highest standards of academic rigour but also create insights that are of value to practitioners - managers, consultants and policy makers. London Business School faculty will select a mix of papers that complement each other, and a panel of distinguished scholars and practitioners will serve as discussants.

The purpose of the conference is threefold:

1. To honour the late Sumantra Ghoshal.
2. To stimulate bridges between management research and practice (with the aim of making management research more relevant and help the practice of management to be more rigorous).
3. To build a community of scholars interested in relevant management research.

The keynote speaker for the conference will be David Teece (UC Berkeley) - Entrepreneurship, Managers, and Markets: Generating a Managerially Relevant Theory of the Firm.

Other confirmed participants include: Gautam Ahuja (University of Michigan); Ramón Casadesus-Masanell (Harvard Business School); Laurence Capron (INSEAD); Henry Chesbrough (UC Berkeley); Gerry George (Imperial College); Martin Kilduff (University College London); Martha Mangelsdorf (MIT, editor of Sloan Management Review); Anita McGahan (University of Toronto); Phanish Puranam (INSEAD); Rita Gunther McGrath (Columbia Business School).

 

Type of sessions and invitation

There are two types of sessions at the Ghoshal conference:

·         Academic paper presentations. There are three tracks of academic papers: 1) Competing on Innovation, Data and Ideas; 2) Strategy and Organization Theory; 3) The Scope and Purpose of the Modern Corporation

·         Panel presentations. These two tracks concern presentations that pertain to a particular subject rather than a particular paper. This year the topics will be "Learning from Outliers" and "The Future of Academic Journal Publishing".

The panel presentations are by invited speakers, while the academic paper presentations are selected through an open submission process (see below for information on how to submit). Depending on the pool of submissions that we receive, the academic tracks may include one or two sessions each. Do note that if we reject your paper this should not be interpreted as a judgement of insufficient quality. Over the past years, many participants indicated that what they greatly appreciated about the conference was the coherence of the sessions. Hence, not including your paper can simply mean that we did not have any other suitable papers to match it with. Most conferences and journals reject papers based on quality alone. Of course, quality is a necessary condition for acceptance at the Ghoshal conference, but as explained, a rejection does not mean that the quality was deemed insufficient; it could simply be an issue of fit.

 

Academic paper tracks

I.                    Competing on Innovation, Data and Ideas

Track chair: Gary Dushnitsky

Co-organisers: Kevin Boudreau, Ben Hallen

For this session, we welcome manuscripts that examine topics on innovation, entrepreneurship and their implications for competition. We are equally interested in papers that explore the impact of entrepreneurship and innovation on factors that affect competition (R&D performance, firm survival, industry structure, profits) as on factors that impact the ability to innovate (organizational design and networks, incentive systems, managerial cognition, founder backgrounds). We seek papers with a broad variety of empirical approaches, including rich qualitative work, field experiments, and applied models. We are interested in all types of organizations involved in the innovation process, including not only for-profit established firms but also entrepreneurial ventures, universities, professional associations and innovation communities.

 

II.                  Strategy and Organization Theory

Track chair: Freek Vermeulen

Co-organisers: Aharon Cohen Mohliver, Brandon Lee

Papers in this track pertain to topics on the boundary of strategic management and organization theory. This includes topics such as organizational learning, social comparison, corporate governance, the diffusion of strategies and management practices, social networks, and the role of institutions in strategic behaviour. We are interested in implications for firm performance, but also welcome papers that enhance our understanding of the behaviour of organizations and the social construction of markets.

 

III.               The Scope and Purpose of the Modern Corporation

Track chair: Ioannis Ioannou

Co-organisers: Donal Crilly and Michael Jacobides

This session invites contributions that explore the topic of scope and boundaries of the firm including, but not confined to, issues of corporate strategy. We welcome papers that examine, among others, the geographic and product diversification of the firm, mergers and acquisitions or other forms of inter-firm collaboration. In addition, we would particularly encourage studies that explore the link between scope and purpose of the firm, both theoretically and empirically.

 

Topical panels

I. Learning from Outliers

Organisers: Julian Birkinshaw, Costas Markides, Yiorgos Mylonadis, and Lourdes Sosa

The essence of superior strategy is standing out from the crowd. But most companies end up looking just like their competitors - they copy each other's products and services, they benchmark each other's best practices, and they hire each other's executives.  One well-known way of breaking out of this self-referential loop is to get inspiration from outliers - from the mavericks within an industry, to the unusual players in related industries and indeed entirely unrelated social settings. This sounds like a good idea, but it is extremely hard to do in practice. The evidence shows that the interesting "outliers" in the world of business, companies such as Apple, Google, Semco, Oticon, WL Gore, and HCL, typically attract a great deal of interest but don't end up having much real impact on the companies studying them. In this session, the panellists will discuss why learning from outliers can be so powerful, as well as the reasons why it is so difficult to do so.

 

II. The Future of Academic Journal Publishing                  

Organiser: Sendil Ethiraj

An important instrument of evaluating the quality of human capital is the institution of academic journals. Two important characteristics of journals are in turn proxies for quality - journal ranking or status and its readership or impact factor. The world of academic journals is being buffeted by the rise of electronic media much as the newspaper industry suffered its consequences over the last decade. This is occurring via two important pathways. First, the rise of self-publishing (either on authors' own websites or on aggregators such as SSRN) is making papers accessible in much earlier stages than was possible. Before an article gets into print in an 'A' journal, it is often downloaded and read thousands of times and perhaps even cited as a working paper. This is likely to affect the impact factor of the academic journal because the article may be 'dated' by the time it gets into print. Second, as open access journals and aggregator websites make research available for free, their pay wall protected academic journal counterparts become increasingly a cost that is seen as superfluous by both authors and institutions that pay a subscription fee. As subscription fees decline, the journals will become increasingly unviable. In this session, we aim to bring in a panel of editors from the leading 'A' journals in strategy to discuss these possibilities and how our human capital evaluation systems might have to adapt to continue using robust and objective metrics to inform promotion decisions.

 

As mentioned above, the panel presenters are predominantly invited speakers. However, if you are potentially interested in contributing to one of these two sessions, please contact the conference organiser (Isabel Fernandez-Mateo).

 

Submission process

If you are interested in presenting in one of the academic tracks, please send your paper submission to both the conference organiser, Isabel Fernandez-Mateo (ifernandezmateo@london.edu), and the conference administrator, Helen Henderson (hhenderson@london.edu), indicating the track(s) in which you are interested. They will distribute your proposal to the relevant track organisers.

The deadline for submission is January 31^st 2013. Submissions selected for presentation will be notified by March 7^th, 2013. London Business School will reimburse economy airfare (amount TBC) and arrange accommodation for presenters who attend both days of the conference.

For more information on the conference, on the department of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the London Business School, as well as previous Sumantra Ghoshal Strategy Conferences please visit http://www.theghoshalconference.com.