Event Description

What are the strategic and innovation challenges facing Danish firms in the contemporary global economy, and how should these challenges be addressed?
These questions form the theme of an afternoon event brought to you by the Department of Strategy and Innovation at CBS.
This free event will feature executive briefings and an inspirational keynote talk by Thomas Woldbye, the CEO of Copenhagen Airport, about the challenges facing business today.
The event provides a unique opportunity to get insights from business leaders, the latest research from strategy and innovation scholars, and opportunities for discussion and networking in an informal setting.

Program

Masterclasses:

1. Gender inclusion in innovation and entrepreneurship. This session will focus on gender inclusion in access to resources needed to innovate and to scale-up ventures. Louise Mors will present the Benefits and Challenges of Diverse Teams in Science, and will examine multiple dimensions of team diversity.  Mercedes Delgado will discuss how geographical frictions (cost of mobility) affect the team choices of female versus male inventors and will offer some managerial implications to improve innovation. Her discussion will focus on the paper Are Female Inventors Geographically Constrained? Gender Differences in Team Collocation (supported by a National Science Foundation grant). The session will include the perspective of Deepa Daniels, co-founder and COO of Develop Diverse.
2. Creating and capturing value from innovation: small entrepreneurial firms vis a vis their large counterparts. While many innovations are initiated by small entrepreneurial firms, the knowledge and resources of a large company are often needed to successfully develop the innovation and to maximize its commercial value. In this session, we discuss two common ways by which entrepreneurs may involve large companies in the innovation process. José Mata will discuss research alliances between small entrepreneurial firms and large established companies, and Thomas Rønde will discuss acquisitions of high-tech startups by incumbents. The focus of the talks will be on the tension between creating value jointly while ensuring a fair division of the returns from innovation. Then these issues will be discussed from a practitioner’s perspective.
3. Preparedness: The old-new P of strategy. Risk and uncertainty have always been central elements in strategy development. But the current multitude of crises have highlighted how important strategic preparedness is. In this session, Thomas Ritter and Carsten Lund Pedersen present a strategy framework that explicitly includes preparedness as one of five P’s of strategy—and he explains the four capabilities that organizations can work with to develop their preparedness. Being prepared is the hot topic for leaders at the moment, so please join this session to get prepared.