Strategic management: SMS and Bocconi attract 1,000 academics to Rome
The 30th SMS Annual International Conference (September 12-15, https://rome.strategicmanagement.net), the gathering of international scholars of strategic management which will attract to Rome (Marriot Park Hotel, via Masala 54) one thousand academics from all over the world, is co-organized by Università Bocconi. Gianmario Verona and Maurizio Zollo (Department of management), as members of the local committee, took care of the conference's scientific programme.
With members in excess of 2,500, the Strategic Management Society is the leading association of strategy scholars in the world and allows for the first time a university to be co-organizer of it annual conference. It's also the first time the conference is held in Italy.
The imposing scientific programme foresees four plenary sessions and 15 parallel sessions, with figures never before recorded in a SMS Conference. 1.109 scientific papers have been submitted by 1.791 authors (973 from Europe, 547 from North-America and 182 from Asia) and examined by 461 reviewers. The registered delegates are already nearly 1.000, more than in any other SMS Annual Conference, and are posed to grow (registration is still open at the web address https://rome.strategicmanagement.net/registration/index.php)
The theme of the conference, "Strategic management at the crossroads", points to the epochal change affecting the discipline, now challenged to analyze and understand the interactions of corporate strategic choices with both the decision makers' micro (even neural) processes and the economical, political and social macro processes. With the disciplinary boundaries thus redefined, the scholars are more often drawn to co-operate with other social scientists (neurologists, psychologists, political scientists and macroeconomists, just to say a few) and to stretch the range of their methodological tools.
"Two of the more challenging subjects", Verona and Zollo say, "are the role of business in society after a crisis which harmed the traditional logic of profit maximization and the role of the individual – his competences, attitudes, motivations and emotions – in formulating and implementing a strategy and in innovation and change processes".
Among the noteworthy events of the conference there is a plenary session with Mario Monti (former European commissioner of competition) and Emma Marcegaglia (head of Confindustria, the Italian industrialists association) debating integration strategies in politics and in corporate life. In another plenary session, Sergio Bertolucci, the scientific director of Geneva's CERN and a highly-rated scientist, will explain how the leading particles physics lab in the world manages innovation in a continuing, complex balance between competition and cooperation.