STR programme design, strategy & research themes

Programme design and leadership

The programme is managed and organised using self-organising teams (that frequently change over time) of scholars. These teams operate within a research context in which important scientific values and norms are shared. Research collaboration is deliberately encouraged, resulting in a relatively large number of co-authored papers.

Regarding leadership, the management of the research programme focuses on creating, maintaining and further improving a research environment that is collaborative, productive and internationally challeging. To this end, the programme leaders and international visiting professors such as Jeff Reuer, Mike Wright and Ed Zajac set examples and are involved in coaching researchers, in particular regarding co-publishing papers in ERIM P* journals, creating opportunities for submitting papers (e.g. selecting promising conferences, special issues), and creating and improving databases. In the yearly Personal Appraisal Meetings the research output and research ambition of the members are discussed with the supervising professors involved, and challenges for the next year are mutually agreed upon.

Problem formulation and research themes

Strategic renewal relates to the process of combining both the exploitation of existing competencies and the exploration of new competencies resulting in a change of the strategic direction of the organisation and the external networks and industries involved. Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, the research programme seeks to understand and investigate in particular the managerial capabilities, intra- and interorganisational antecedents, environmental conditions and industry context that are likely to enable a firm to renew, augment and adapt its core competence over time.

The research programme endeavours to answer important scientific and societal questions such as:

• How and why do organisational and environmental antecedents and external factors such as those associated with the industry structure and international environment matter in strategic renewal?
• How and why do exploration, exploitation, non-technological determinants of innovation, ambidexterity, corporate entrepreneurship and leadership styles influence strategic renewal?
• How do internationalisation processes (e.g. foreign direct investments and offshoring) influence innovation, productivity and strategic renewal?
• How and why does strategic renewal take place as a multi-level coevolutionary process?
• What roles do (top) managers at the corporate and unit level play in strategic renewal?

Assessing a managerial perspective implies that we take into account that strategic renewal in multi-unit firms involves both top-down as well as bottom-up initiatives like corporate entrepreneurship, new business development, various levels of analysis (corporate, business unit, project, individual), various inter- and intra-organisational forms of renewal, and renewal of management (management innovation and leadership styles).

The research programme aims to provide new knowledge regarding strategic renewal which all result in new theoretical insights, conceptual frameworks, and metrics and measures that capture various attributes of strategic renewal.