DRUID21 Professional Development Workshops (PDWs)

9.00-12.00, October 18, 2021

Professional development workshops (PDWs) are focused, user driven sessions offering a way of sharing ideas, knowledge and expertise with peers in the DRUID community and develop new ideas and projects. There is free access to PDWs for all registered delegates to DRUID21. No further registration required.

PDW1:Strategizing on Grand Challenges (Room: SPs03)

Organizers: Vera Rocha, Grazia D. Santangelo, Wolfgang Sofka (Copenhagen Business School)

Speakers: John Amis, Anne Jacqueminet, Lars Bo Jeppesen, Olenka Kacperczyk, Daniela Maggioni, Myriam Mariani, Klaus Meyer, Marcus Møller Larsen, Vera Rocha, Grazia D. Santangelo, Wolfgang Sofka, Diego Zunino

Grand Challenges are complex problems with global consequences and without easy solutions. Scholarly discussion in management, strategy, and international business has started to engage with these societal problems. The PDW aims to contribute to this conversation by engaging scholars in a discussion about how research can guide companies to strategize on Grand Challenges and offer solutions to society. The PDW is organized into two parts.

The FIRST PART includes four paper presentations, each followed by a discussion by an expert scholar on the topic. The four presentations will feature academic work-in-progress on different Grand Challenges (i.e., empowerment of young entrepreneurs in developing countries, gender gap in startup hires, wage disadvantages of refugee workers, green strategies of multinational firms), based on a variety of methods as well as data.

In the SECOND PART, the scholars invited to act as discussants of the papers presented in the first part will gather and contribute to a panel debate about the status quo of transformational research on Grand Challenges and what we should aim for, as scholars contributing to this discussion.

The audience will be invited to join the conversation and engage in Q&As with the speakers at the end of each paper presentation and during the panel discussion.

PWD2: Corporate Entrepreneurship, Venture Financing and Innovation (Room: SP113)

Organizers: Francesco Di Lorenzo (Copenhagen Business School, Haemin Dennis Park (Naveen Jindal School of Management, University of Texas)

Speakers: Gary Dushnitsky, Dennis Juul Poulsen, Juanita Gonzalez-Uribe, Joan Jofra, Christopher Sabel, Vareska Van de Vrande

Since Schumpeter’s work (1942), the relationship between incumbent firms and new entrants became a central topic for strategy, entrepreneurship and innovation scholars. In particular, how large firms and new ventures collaborate to improve innovation frontiers and achieve growth goals received a great deal of attention. On the one hand, large firms have experimented with different models to stimulate and create entrepreneurial activities and culture within and across their boundaries: internal innovation competitions for employees, corporate accelerator and incubators, spinouts activities and the creation of corporate venture capital funds. On the other hand, new ventures have extended their more traditional set of investors from which to gather resources including corporations. These dynamics in the domains of entrepreneurial financing and corporate growth have generated almost two decades of a rich theoretical and empirical research agenda.

Building on these foundations, the PDW aims to present and discuss some advances on how collaborations and interactions between corporations and new ventures impact innovation and competitive dynamics.

PWD 3: Current Challenges in Science Funding (Room: SP213)

Organizers: HC Kongsted and Valentina Tartari (Copenhagen Business School)

Co-organized by the Triple-I-Research project, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation

Speakers: Andrea Mina, Ali Mohammadi, Michele Pezzoni, Henry Sauermann, Valentina Tartari, Reinhilde Veugelers, Kyle Myers

Funders’ panel: Thomas Alslev Christensen (Novo Nordisk Foundation); Flemming Besenbacher (Carlsberg Foundation); Mette Rosenkilde (Independent Research Fund Denmark)

Several changes in funding arrangements over the last few decades have attracted the attention of scholars in innovation studies and economics of science. Tighter fiscal austerity and a declining allocation for government funding for science, coupled with the increasing costs of conducting scientific research, means that scientists may struggle to sustain their activities and therefore need to find alternative funding sources for their work. Charities and international funding agencies have simultaneously become more prominent in the funding landscape. Despite increased interest in the topic and the contributions provided so far, the literature on scientific funding is only starting to address questions regarding the increasing variety of funding mechanisms and outcomes for individual scientists and, more generally, the rate and direction of scientific research.

In this PDW, we will review recent advances, provide an overview of new data and methods, and identify promising paths for future work. The session brings together scholars who are leveraging these advances and representatives of public and private funders of public research to discuss different schemes for funding of public research, how the risk-taking behavior of funders and applicants can be affected by different funding schemes, and in turn, what are the implications for the direction and the rate of progress of science. We will present and discuss recent theoretical advances and cutting-edge empirical methods, followed by a panel discussion in which presenters will engage with public and private funder representatives to enrich and synthesize the discussion and, most importantly, soliciting questions from and engaging in discussion with the PDW participants.