Welcome From The Conference Program Chair
My Esteemed Colleagues:
We are looking forward to soon welcome you to sunny Southern California! The City of San Diego is pleased to host the 27th Annual International Conference of the Strategic Management Society (SMS).
The themes of SMS conferences over the years have sought to focus on topics that were novel, yet of enduring interest to academics, practitioners and consultants. I am confident that this year's theme continues that tradition.
Sessions at this year's conference will focus broadly on issues such as Market and Non-Market Strategies and Globalization, Competitive Strategies, Global Strategies, Knowledge and Innovation and the Practice of Strategy. Other sessions will focus on relationships between the conference theme and strategy process, corporate strategy and governance, and entrepreneurship and strategy. These are topics which, when combined with the influences of non-market forces, can produce discussions charged with sociological, political, ethical as well as economic debates. As has been the case in the past, I am certain that you will find these debates open, constructive, and grounded in sound theory and rigorous empirical research.
The structure of the conference program keeps faith with the past, while continuing the practice of recent years to introduce new program elements. In this year's conference the highly successful innovation of common ground sessions, employed for the first time in 2006 in Vienna at the close of the program on Monday and Tuesday, becomes fully integrated into the program. And the San Diego program witnesses the introduction of a new initiative focused on Excellence in Teaching, ably guided by Idie Kessner of Indiana University. It not only finds its way into the competitive part of the program but also into that part of the program in which attendees meet in plenary session.
This year's plenary sessions will also enable those in attendance in San Diego to hear, among others, from distinguished practitioners and scholars such as Martin Coles (COO, Starbucks), Jonathan Murray (Microsoft), Timo Ali-Vehmas (Nokia), C.K. Prahalad (University of Michigan), and David Baron (Stanford University).
This year's competitive program will offer those present in San Diego 72 paper and 35 common ground sessions, organized around three conference theme tracks, seven Interest Group tracks and the excellence in teaching track. Once again, we have enjoyed record interest in the conference and its theme. A total of 176 reviewers from the seven Interest Groups reviewed close to 800 submissions. The process of putting together this year's program has benefited enormously from the participation of the Program Chairs of the Interest Groups, Duncan Angwin, David Audretsch, Mark Kriger, Bente Lowendahl, Xavier Martin, Mike Peng, and Margarethe Wiersema, as well as the active participation of Thomas Mellewigt of the Free University Berlin, who serves as Associate Program Chair and will assume Program Chair duties next year in Koln, Germany. We all owe an enormous debt of gratitude to these many individuals as well as to the Interest Group leadership. Collectively, they are the backbone of the Society and they have made this year's program possible.
As has been the case in the past, again this year a number of papers have been selected as finalists for the SMS Best Conference Paper Prize, the new SMS Best Paper for Practice Implications Prize, and the Booz Allen Hamilton/Strategic Management Society PhD Fellowship awards. The finalists are highlighted in the program booklet and we urge you to seek out their presentations.
The goal of the conference is to foster an exchange of ideas among professionals in the field of strategic management. I sincerely hope that each of you will be able to take full advantage of the hard work of those who put together the program. Those individuals who are on the program have provided us with a wide variety of ideas to be debated. The same goes for the plenary speakers, the common ground facilitators, competitive paper session chairs and discussants, reviewers, Interest Group leadership, SMS Board members and very specially, the Society's Executive Office staff, whose guidance insured that none of my missteps produced serious flaws in the program.
You will enjoy San Diego and take advantage of the learning environment provided by the Society and its membership.
Peter Smith Ring
Conference Program Chair
Loyola Marymount University