Silky Paths in Strategy Workshop
Strategy scholars across career stages-PhD students, early-career faculty, senior scholars, and even editors-often experience a shared set of intellectual challenges: difficulty articulating a coherent scholarly identity, knowing how to conduct research but not how to frame it, struggling to turn individual papers into a coherent research program, and sensing that their ideas matter while audiences nonetheless fail to follow the path that leads to them. To create space for serious reflection on these institutionalized challenges, we invite submissions to Silky Paths in Strategy, a retreat-style workshop to be held May 20–22, 2026, on Bintan Island, Indonesia (via Singapore).
The workshop centers on the idea of the Silky Path: the craft of guiding an audience via the intellectual foundations in strategy toward understanding one's scholarly identity. Rather than focusing on individual papers, the workshop emphasizes framing, sequencing, and accumulation-how research programs take shape over time, how foundational ideas are mobilized as enabling tools, and how scholars help others follow their thinking. This is not a conventional paper-based conference. It is a deliberately generative forum designed for deep reflection, dialogue, and collective sensemaking about the future of strategy research.
Authors of selected proposals will be invited to participate in a small, retreat-style workshop involving approximately 40–60 scholars across all career stages.
Why Submit?
This workshop offers a rare opportunity to step back from individual projects and consider your work holistically: how your ideas are framed, how they accumulate into a research program, and how they travel across audiences and career stages. Participants will engage in sustained discussion with scholars facing similar challenges, across different institutional and career contexts.
The workshop is developed in close conversation with Strategic Management Review (SMR). Its explicit goal is to cultivate a coherent body of ideas that can anchor a future SMR Special Issue or related collective outputs. Both SMR Co-Editors, Michael Leiblein and Jeffrey Reuer, will attend the workshop and participate in the discussions. Participation does not guarantee publication.
Submission Guidelines
• Proposal Length: 3–7 double-spaced pages
• Submission Deadline: February 12, 2026
• Submission Email: StrategySilkyPath@gmail.com
The proposal should be self-reflective: it should articulate the intellectual challenges motivating participation, such as issues of framing, positioning, research program coherence, foundations, and audience understanding. If authors already have a complete paper draft, it may be submitted to accompany the proposal or in lieu of it.
Logistics
• Location: Nirwana Gardens Resort, Bintan Island (via Singapore)
• Conference Fee: SGD 600 (includes ferry transfers from Singapore, local transportation, and all meals)
• Accommodation: Approximately SGD 150 (120 USD) per night
• Visa: Most nationalities are eligible for Visa on Arrival or e-VOA
• Financial Support: Financial support may be available, with priority given to PhD students and early-career scholars
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Wesley W. Koo
Assistant Professor
Johns Hopkins University
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