PhD projects

in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship


The field of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship focuses on understanding why some firms perform better than others, how firms behave, and what determines success in international competition. Given its broad scope, the field is highly integrative and multi-disciplinary, and feeds on insights from a wide range of disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, law, finance, and economics. The field focuses on actions associated with changing the firm's scope and profile of business lines. It also addresses questions of how decision-makers can best leverage knowledge and innovation to foster competitive advantage for their firms as well as how external forces influence firms and entrepreneurs in a global context and in societies expecting more sustainable strategies. Other topics include entrepreneurial behavior in new ventures, scale-ups, and established organisations. Moreover, the field focuses on how strategic leadership and governance shape firms, firm behavior, and outcomes. 

Current themes that have the focus of our faculty and PhD candidates are:

  1. Strategy, Organization, and Governance. This line aims to explain and identify the mechanisms through which modern firms shape and align their organisational structures, governance and ownership with the strategies, resource dependencies, and business models through which they create and capture value.
  2. Strategic Entrepreneurship. This strand is concerned with understanding how organisations link entrepreneurial behaviour and strategic advantage-seeking actions to create and capture wealth.
  3. Strategy, Knowledge, and Innovation. This theme focuses on how managers and entrepreneurs build and renew the technological, social, and relational capital to shape new technologies and business models.
  4. Global Strategy. This branch 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 and societies expecting sustainable practices.
  5. Behavioural Strategy and Entrepreneurial Behaviour. This branch informs us about the psychology behind high-impact and complex strategic and entrepreneurial decisions.

More extensive descriptions of these themes can be found here.