Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship

A combination of economic, political, and social forces gives rise to a wide range of organizational forms. Research in strategy, organization, and governance aims to explain and identify the mechanisms through which modern firms shape and align their organizational structures, governance and ownership with the strategies, resource dependencies, and business models through which they create and capture value. Research in our group is highly versatile, including projects investigating the re-emergence of craft organizations and state capitalism on the world stage, the competitive advantage and strategic resilience of business groups, owner-managed firms, family firms, and professional partnerships, and how active owners shape the strategies and the organizational and governance structures of listed firms across different national contexts. Our research often takes up a comparative perspective, involving both comparisons between different institutional contexts and comparisons between different organizational forms.

In today’s fast-paced environments, wealth creation demands proficiency in continuously identifying and generating new opportunities for growth. At the nexus of entrepreneurship and strategic management, research on strategic entrepreneurship is concerned with understanding how organizations link entrepreneurial behaviour and strategic advantage-seeking actions to create and capture wealth. The work in our group focuses on ambidexterity, corporate entrepreneurship, scaling up, and strategy implementation. Exemplary research addresses such aspects as: how organizations strengthen their core business while also developing new businesses that will define the future; how organizations become more entrepreneurial through the generation of new businesses within established systems and through strategic renewal; how some organizations can ignite rapid growth and scale up successfully by leveraging new technologies, establishing platforms, redefining boundaries, and developing new and scalable business models; and how new practices and technologies enable firms to implement strategies which focus on venturing into new businesses as well as strengthening their core.

New technologies and new business models reshape the way firms do business. This calls for new insights into how managers and entrepreneurs can best innovate and leverage knowledge to build competitive advantages for their firms. The field of strategy, knowledge, and innovation focuses on how managers and entrepreneurs build and renew the technological, social, and relational capital to shape such innovations. It addresses such issues as strategic renewal, innovation management, management innovation and the rise of new organizational forms, collaborative and open innovation, innovation ecosystems, and corporate venturing. Our group covers a wide range of topics in this area, such as: micro-foundations of absorptive capacity and dynamic capabilities that enable innovation; the origins of business model innovations; the implications of technological disruptions; the mechanisms of effective collaborations to achieve innovation by large incumbent firms and new ventures; and the governance and assessment of the impact of such collaborations.

The competitive landscape of firms is increasingly dynamic, diverse, and global. The field of global strategy aims to enrich our understanding of how internationally operating firms form and implement their strategies, and how firms shape, and are shaped by, their global context. It focuses on foreign-entry strategies in culturally, politically, and economically heterogeneous contexts, and ultimately on the determinants of success or failure in international arenas. Our group typically adopts an institutions-based perspective, which argues that international firms are constrained and enabled by widely diverse, durable rules of the game, as illustrated by the diverse societal expectations around competitive behaviour and sustainability performance. Exemplary research projects in our group include novel views on culture, cross-border knowledge transfer, strategic responses to institutional voids, influences of governments and other stakeholders on corporate environmental practices, cross-country and within-country variance in institutions, and international strategies of the largest companies, born-globals, and emerging-market multinationals.