Along with Don Siegel, Nick Wilson, and Mike Wright, I am guest editing a special issue of Managerial and Decision Economics on the “Effects of Alternative Investments on Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Growth.” Proposals are due 15 June 2011. A special issue conference for developing the papers is planned for 29 October 2011 at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan. The conference is jointly sponsored by the SUNY-Albany School of Business, the Centre for Private Equity Research at Imperial College Business School, and the McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Further details and submission guidelines are below the fold.

Call for Papers: 
Special Issue of Managerial and Decision Economics

EFFECTS OF ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS
ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP, INNOVATION, AND GROWTH

Submission Due Date: June 15, 2012
Special Issue Conference: October 29, 2012

Guest Editors:
Peter Klein, University of Missouri
Donald Siegel, University at Albany, SUNY
Nick Wilson, Leeds University Business School
Mike Wright, Imperial College Business School

Special Issue Conference sponsored by
School of Business, University at Albany, SUNY
Centre for Private Equity Research, Imperial College Business School
McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, University of Missouri

Introduction

The past decade has brought rapid growth in a variety of specialist alternative investment vehicles, including venture capital, business angel funds, later-stage private equity, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, infrastructure funds, and real estate funds. The importance of venture capital and angel investment for new firms, particularly in high-growth, high-technology sectors, is well known. But alternative investments span a wide range of company types, from small, early-stage ventures with high growth rates but little cash flow to large firms in mature industries that generate substantial cash flow.

Alternative investment vehicles introduce new forms of financing with different objectives and diverse forms of involvement by investors in portfolio firms. Alternative investors differ widely in skills, goals, experience, and investment time horizons. They often invest across a variety of institutional environments, transferring standard investment approaches from one sector or country to another. Because these alternative equity stakes are generally less liquid than shares in publicly traded enterprises, their growth raises a host of important issues for the organization and governance of portfolio companies, for the structure of industries heavily dependent on alternative investment pools, and for entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth more generally.

This special issue of Managerial and Decision Economics focuses on the effects of alternative investments on entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth. These issues are especially timely given current debates about the role of alternative investments in stimulating economic outcomes and the need for diverse sources of capital to stimulate economic growth in conditions of severe recession. We welcome theoretical papers, large scale quantitative analyses, and focused case studies.

Research Questions

Research questions that contributors to the special issue might address include:

• How does the nature of deals vary by different types of alternative investor? What factors are influential in determining these differences?
• What are the relationships between financial structuring of deals and the nature and extent of entrepreneurship and innovation in portfolio firms?
• How does financial structure affect entrepreneurial alertness, judgment, and innovation not only in new firms, but in established organizations as well?
• To what extent do alternative investors engage in funding both restructuring and innovative activities? What are the effects of alternative investments on growth at the level of the firm, sector, region, and economy?
• How do buyout firms attempt to increase innovation within public companies that are taken private?
• How have the roles of alternative investment vehicles changed over time, as in the changing roles of venture capital firms and business angels in Silicon Valley?
• How do venture capital and angel investors organize themselves into networks? How do these affect venture performance?
• What is the nature of the contractual relationships between alternative investors and founders or operators of startup companies?
• What explains the clustering of alternative investments across industries? Across time and place?
• To what extent can alternative investors, as “active” participants in their portfolio companies, themselves be modeled as entrepreneurs?

Papers on related issues not explicitly listed above are also welcome.

Submission and Review Process

Submissions must be made on or before June 15, 2012. All papers will be externally reviewed according to standard policies of Managerial and Decision Economics.

Conference Details and Time Line

To aid in the development of papers, a special issue conference will be held at the SUNY Global Center in Midtown Manhattan October 29, 2012.

Accommodation and meals will be provided for all authors and discussants attending the conference. Financial support is provided by the School of Business and the Center for Institutional Investment Management at the University at Albany, SUNY, the Centre for Private Equity Research at Nottingham University Business School, and the McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Missouri.

Key dates:
June 15, 2012: Deadline for electronic submission of papers to the conference and special issues
August 15, 2012: Notification to authors regarding acceptance for conference
October 29, 2012 : Special Issue Conference at the SUNY Global Center

More Information

For additional information, please contact see http://mcquinn.missouri.edu/cfp2012June15.htm or contact the special issue editors:
Peter Klein, University of Missouri, pklein@missouri.edu
Donald Siegel, University at Albany, SUNY, dsiegel@uamail.albany.edu
Mike Wright, Imperial College, London, mike.wright@imperial.ac.uk
Nick Wilson, Leeds University Business School, nw@lubs.leeds.ac.uk

Via Scott Masten, an important call for papers:

The Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is issuing a call for original research papers to be presented at the Conference on the Law & Economics of Organization: New Challenges and Directions.  The conference will be held at the Haas School of Business in Berkeley, CA, on Friday, Nov. 30, and Saturday, Dec. 1, 2012. The purpose of the conference is to take stock of recent advances in the analysis of economic organization and institutions inspired by the work of 2009 Nobel Laureate Oliver Williamson and to examine its implications for contemporary problems of organization and regulation. Empirical research and research informed by detailed industry and institutional knowledge is especially welcome.  Conference papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization. Submissions are due March 31, 2012.  See the Call for Papers for details.

This year’s DRUID conference, “Innovation and Competitiveness: Dynamics of Organizations, Industries, Systems and Regions,” is 19-21 June 2012 in Copenhagen. See the call for papers below the fold. Submission deadline is 29 February. 

 

The Call for Papers for the 2012 ISNIE conference, 14-16 June 2012 at the University of Southern California, is now posted. Proposals are due 30 January 2012, so start working on those abstracts!

I have been involved with ISNIE for many years and currently serve as the organization’s treasurer. The conferences are terrific, with a variety of papers, panels, and keynotes spanning the broad range of institutional and organizational social science research.

Trivia: I first met the good Professor Foss at the inaugural ISNIE conference in 1997 in St. Louis So if it weren’t for ISNIE, this blog might not exist. . . .

O&M friend Brent Ross sends along this CFP for a track session of the 2012 Wageningen International Conference on Chain and Network Management. The session, “Managing Wicked Problems: The Role of Multi-Stakeholder Engagements for Resource and Value Creation,” is linked to a special issue of the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review. Info below the fold:

Management scholars and practitioners recognize that engagement with stakeholders is crucial for a firm to gain the necessary resources and capabilities to innovate, compete and create shared value (Teece and Pisano 1997; Freeman 2005; Kramer and Porter 2006). Furthermore, multi-stakeholder engagements have become a common means in the agri-food sector to address the increasingly presence of “wicked problems” such as sustainability (Batie 2008, Peterson 2009). “Wicked problems” cannot be framed and solved in any traditional way because they have no closed-form definition, deal with complex systems in which cause and effect relationships are either unknown or highly uncertain, and have multiple stakeholders with strongly-held, diverse, and conflicting values related to the problem. From the point of view of the firm, managing “wicked problems” requires the engagement of multiple stakeholders (De Wit and Meyer 2010, Peterson 2011) such as supply chain partners, universities, government agencies, NGOs and civil society.

Managing interactions and undertaking initiatives simultaneously with multiple stakeholders can represent an effective strategy for organizations in the agri-food sector to tackle “wicked problems”, share and co-create the resources and capabilities, and to create shared value. In practice, however, managing multi-stakeholder engagements present numerous challenges. Organizations need adequate initial resources and capabilities to start interacting with multiple stakeholders; the process of sharing and co-creating resources and learning from multiple stakeholders has to be efficient and effective; the expected outcomes of sharing and co-creating resources have to be identified and measured; the risk of possible negative outcomes of multi-stakeholder interactions has to be managed.  Alternative governance mechanisms are often used to address these important multi-stakeholder issues.

Given the nature and the importance of “wicked problems”, this call for papers aims to deepen management scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of how an organization can effectively undertake multi-stakeholder interactions to develop resources and capabilities and ultimately create shared value. Therefore, we encourage submissions of papers that tackle a broad range of questions, including (but not limited to) the following:

·  What is the impact of multi-stakeholder engagements on the sharing and co-creation of resources and capabilities, and value creation?  Can value be created for both private firms and their stakeholders in the presence of “wicked problems”? What is the relationship between reaching commonly agreed sustainability objectives and creating value for the firm?

·  Which resources and capabilities are necessary and/or sufficient to create shared value in the context of “wicked problems” such as sustainability?  Which stakeholders can provide them and under which conditions? In turn, what are the initial resources and capabilities needed to effectively engage with multiple stakeholders? Is there a critical mass of stakeholders and/or resources and capabilities that is required to initiate and sustain engagement? How does the process of multiple stakeholders sharing and co-creating resources and capabilities take place?

·  Are reputation and legitimacy resources co-created or shared in multi-stakeholder engagements? Does the member composition of the multi-stakeholder engagement matter? Which member inclusion/exclusion mechanisms are effective to enhance stakeholders’ reputation and legitimacy? What is the impact of a stakeholder drop-out on the reputation and legitimacy of the multi-stakeholder engagement? What is the relationship between stakeholder heterogeneity or representativeness, on legitimacy and reputation of the multi-stakeholder engagement?

·   Which organizational structures and governance mechanisms are most effective to allow multiple stakeholders to share and co-create resources and capabilities and create value? In particular, what is the effect of managing a formal multi-stakeholder alliance versus an informal network of multi-stakeholder interactions?

·  How do multi-stakeholder engagements evolve over time? What are the causes and effects of change and the implications for stakeholders? What are the challenges and implications of downscaling global multi-stakeholder initiatives to a local level? What are the challenges and implications of up-scaling local multi-stakeholder initiatives to an international level?

Both empirical and conceptual papers are welcome and we strongly encourage multi-disciplinary submissions from scholars in areas such as management, law and economics, public administration and policy, marketing, organizational behavior, communication, education, development, sociology, and psychology among others. In addition to the track session, submissions will be subject to a double-blind review process and will be considered for publication in a special issue of the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review on managing multi-stakeholder engagements.

To insure full consideration for the track session and for the special issue of the IFAMR, please submit/upload your full papers using the IFAMR submission process found at www.ifama.org. You should submit/upload your paper under the folder WICKED no later than January 5th, 2011.  Papers should follow the manuscript guidelines posted for IFAMR.

References

Batie, S. (2008). “Wicked Problems and Applied Economics.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 90 (5), 1176–1191.

De Wit, B. and Meyer, R. (20100. Strategy Synthesis: Resolving Strategy Paradoxes to Create Competitive Advantage. 2^nd Edition, Cengage Learning.

Freeman, R.E., J. S. Harrison, A. C. Wicks, B.L. Parmar, S. de Colle (2010). Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art. Cambridge University Press.

Peterson, C. (2009). “Transformational supply chains and the ‘wicked problem’ of sustainability: aligning knowledge, innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership.” Journal of Chain and Network Science  9(2): 71-82.

Peterson, C. (2011). An Epistemology for Agribusiness: Peers, Methods, and Engagement in the Agri-food-bio System. Forthcoming on the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review.

Porter, M.E. and Kramer, M.R. (2006). “Strategy & Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility.” Harvard Business Review (12/2006), 1-16.

Teece, D. and Pisano, G. (1997). “The Dynamic Capabilities of Firms: an Introduction.” Industrial and Corporate Change 3 (3), 537-556.

Deadline for WICANEM Full Paper Submission: January 5th, 2012.

Deadline for IFAMR Full Paper Submission: January 5th, 2012.

Timeline for IFAMR double-blind review only (additional information soon on www.ifama.org):

Deadline for IFAMR Full Paper Submission:              January 5th, 2012.

Notification of Acceptance/Revision/Rejection:       March 30th, 2012.

Deadline to Revise Accepted Papers:                    June 10th, 2012.

Final Notification of Acceptance/Rejection:            September 15th, 2012.

The SMG-McQuinn conference, “Multi- and Micro-Level Issues in Strategic Entrepreneurship,” starts today. Not sure if live-blogging will be feasible (“Nicolai Foss has stepped to the podium. Blue tie, white shirt. Scans the crowd….”) but we’ll post information when we can. The program is here. Some reflections on last year’s conference are here. Naturally Nicolai and I will be in book-promotion mode, hopefully not obnoxiously so.

Update: Per Bylund is doing some live blogging at the McQuinn blog.

Kudos to former guest blogger David Gerard for helping organize and host the conference with the über-cool name, Schumptoberfest, 21-23 October at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. David Hounshell is giving the keynote address, and the rest looks good too.

The European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS) is having the 2012 annual conference in Helsinki, July 2-7. The overall theme is design, and one of the subthemes is “Self-reinforcing Processes in Organizations, Networks and Professions,” a subject sure to interest many O&Mers. See the links above for details. Blurb after the fold:

‘Self-reinforcement dynamics’ are defined as a process of positive feedback in which the increase of a particular variable leads to a further increase of this very variable. Examples of such intended and unintended processes, which bring about an action pattern which eventually gets deeply embedded in (inter-) organizational or professional practice, are self-justification, increasing returns, positive and negative network externalities, and adjusting expectations. The sub-theme particularly invites contributions that focus on one or more of the following issues:

• The role of triggering events and actions in self-reinforcing processes
• Organizational learning and self-reinforcing dynamics.
• The logic of self-reinforcing mechanisms and their development over time (network effects, economies of scale, complementarities, etc.)
• Surfacing self-reinforcing patterns in organizations and/or professions: making self-reinforcing dynamics reflexive
• Studying self-reinforcing processes and systemic practices in organizations and/or professions, e.g. the mutual institutionalization of professional roles and professional schools.
• Analyzing self-reinforcing processes in inter-organizational relations and practices, focusing, e.g., on science-industry relations, regional clusters, local and global financial markets, etc.
• The interaction between self-reinforcing processes at different levels (individual, group, organizational, network, field, profession) and the underlying linkages.
• Breaking the code: to stop self-reinforcement with the help of intentional and unintentional activities (e.g. stopping events, break outs, paradoxical interventions by third party, or designing unlearning patterns).
• Designing self-reinforcing mechanisms?
• Characteristics of “lock-in” stages and related events.

The sub-theme intends to foster an exchange of theoretical ideas and empirical research results across various substantive issues and theoretical traditions that are important for better understanding self-reinforcing dynamics. Papers that discuss such substantive issues, and possibly others, empirically or conceptually, comparatively or monographically, with regard to recent or more historical developments, are cordially invited.

I’m often at pains to describe to my family what happens at academic conferences, and why its important that I attend them. But not any longer.

For further study, check out the associated paper.

HT: Eirik S. Knudsen

Readers new to O&M may not have noticed the “Events” tab above. Here we maintain an ad hoc list of conferences, seminars, and other activities of likely interest to students and scholars of organizations, strategy, entrepreneurship, institutions, and the like. (Readers are encouraged to forward their suggestions.) Sample:

• VI Research Workshop on Institutions and Organizations
  Rio de Janeiro, 3-4 October 2011
• “Multi- and Micro-Level Issues in Strategic Entrepreneurship”
  Copenhagen, 13-14 October 2011
• “Achieving Coexistence of Biotech, Conventional & Organic Foods in the Marketplace”
  Vancouver, 26-28 October 2011
• International Agribusiness PAA-PENSA Conference
  Buenos Aires, 30 November – 2 December 2011

(NB: The “Papers” and “Projects” tabs need some updating, but we’ll get right on it.)