Dear colleagues,
When we first solicited the academic community for submissions to a two-day workshop we organize at the Stockholm School of Economics on "Leveraging sports contexts to advance management research" next April, we could not envision what unfolded in the following months.
The current Coronavirus (COVID-19) health crisis makes us re-think our intent and timing, as we cannot expose participants to the risk entailed in travelling to Stockholm via crowded airports. While our first instinct was to cancel or delay the event, we decided to go ahead and leverage digital technologies to make this community-building initiative happen in a safe space for all participants. That is, we are going virtual! Rather than a two-day traditional paper and idea development workshop (April 17-18), we will host an online workshop on Friday, April 17.
The online format was not our plan A. Yet, necessity is the mother of invention. The global health crises made us think deeper, got us out of our cognitive tracks, and possibly emboldened us. The consequence is that we see the current situation as an opportunity to develop a capability that will allow us to organize academic workshops that are more sustainable (e.g., by entailing less travel), more inclusive (e.g., by extending our reach to colleagues that cannot fly), and more future-oriented (e.g., by making fuller use of digital technologies for academic conversations). As a side benefit, this will also save a lot of time to conference participants (e.g., travel time to the venue, conference downtime, etc.).
To our delight, all four invited senior scholars - Matthew Bothner (ESMT Berlin), Karin Hoisl (U. of Mannheim), Martin Kilduff (UCL), and Tom Moliterno (U. of Massachusetts Amherst) – swiftly supported our decision to go virtual and confirmed their participation to the online workshop.
Going virtual also means that our potential participants base broadens. Thus, we decided to extend our submission deadline to March 15, to benefit colleagues who did not respond to our previous call due to travel limitations.
During the coming weeks, we will work hard to re-design the workshop for the online format. Hence, if you have experience in running such developmental events for a relatively large crowd (we estimate 30-50 people), we would be very happy to take your advice.
More information about the content of the conference and the format of the two types of submission – full papers and early ideas – can be found in the attached revised call for papers. For any additional question, please contact us at christofer.laurell@hhs.se.
Look forward to having you with us!
The Workshop Organizing Committee
Jan Ross (Imperial College London)
Fabio Fonti (Rennes School of Business)
Christofer Laurell & Martin Carlsson-Wall (Stockholm School of Economics)
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Paolo Aversa
Associate Professor of Strategy
Cass Business School, City, University of London
STR Communications Director
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