Previous Executive Forums
- Program in Innovation Management and Innovation Strategy
Corporate Innovation in Focus
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SINCE 2016: We've been bringing leading thinkers and scholars together with executives from participating companies to discuss central issues in innovation management and strategy. A select group of doctoral and master students working with new questions in this area attend as well. These intense seminars combine lectures, group discussions, planary discussions, and Q&A with internationally recognized thought leaders from Scandinavia, Europe, and the United States.

8 SEP 2025
Strategy in Uncertain Times
Rita McGrath, best-selling author and longtime faculty member at Columbia Business School will delve into strategic inflection points and strategic moves, as we discuss portfolio thinking, making small bets, and learning when to scale or stop initiatives.
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17 OCT 2023
Strategic Management of Innovation: Delivering Profitable Growth through Innovation
Jackson Nickerson is a globally recognized authority on organizational design, process improvement, and the anatomy of high-performing teams, and the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy (Emeritus) at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.
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5 MAY 2023
Scaling up Innovation with Crowds and AI
Hila Lifshitz-Assaf is a Professor of Management at Warwick Business School and a visiting faculty at Harvard University, at the Lab for Innovation Science (LISH). She is heading the Artificial Intelligence innovation Network at WBS. Her workshop walked us through the research frontier on AI augmentation and automation in multiple industries from lone inventors to industrial laboratories, collaborative networks, and distributed systems.
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27 SEP 2022
Fostering Belonging & Leading Change from the Middle
Jackson Nickerson is the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy (Emeritus) at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St.Louis. This seminar focused on two topics: first, how you, as a leader, foster a sense of belonging in organizations.
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22 JUNE 2022
Open and simple: The secrets to digital innovation
Georg von Krogh is a Professor at ETH Zurich and holds the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation and specializes in competitive strategy, digital innovation, and organizational knowledge. His workshop focused on core principles of organizing for digital innovation, namely organizational openness to external knowledge and process simplification.
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29 AUG 2019
Seeing around corners
Rita McGrath is a globally recognized expert on innovation and growth strategies with an emphasis on corporate entrepreneurship. She was here to visit, introduce and pre-launch her new book “Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before they Happen”. She reminded us how transient advantages are and show us a new playbook for strategy.
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13 MAY 2019
Fearless Organizations & SMN Challenge
Amy Edmondson, who is the Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, spoke about how you make your organization fearless in a way that builds its capability.

13 MAR 2019
The Power of Paradox
Wendy Smith is a professor of organizational behavior at Alfred Lerner School of Business at the University of Delaware. She is one of the leading experts in the world on managing paradox in organizations. Professor Smith has taught MBAs and undergraduates at University of Delaware, Harvard and University of Pennsylvania.

6 DEC 2018
Digital Platforms and Business Model Innovation
Marshall Van Alstyne is along with his co-authors the world’s leading authority on digital platforms and how they transform businesses. This does not only apply to companies like Facebook, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb, but traditional companies from clothing, automotive, utilities, banks and financial companies are rapidly moving toward the two-sided markets on networked businesses.

11 SEP 2018
Reverse Seminar: Current Problems in Innovation and Strategy
Professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School facilitated our discussion on select challenges posed by PIMS member companies. The morning session addressed a challenge from BKK related to organizing innovation, while the afternoon session addressed a challenge from Equinor related to leading digitalization initiatives.

25 MAY 2018
Strategy Revisited: Creating and Capturing Value
Paul Verdin has Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard University, where he was a Teaching Fellow with Nobel Laureate Tom Schelling and former Labor Secretary Bob Reich at the JF Kennedy School. He combined this with work at McKinsey, Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, the I.M.F. & the World Bank.

15 FEB 2018
Leadership in a World Overcrowded with Opportunities
Roberto Verganti is Professor of Leadership and Innovation at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, where he directs the Leadin'Lab, the laboratory for LEADership, Design and Innovation. He has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School twice, at the Copenhagen Business School and at the California Polytechnic University

25 SEP 2017
Innovation Ecosystems
Professor Ron Adner from Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College talked about “A New Strategy for Innovation: What Successful Innovators See that Others miss” and how to use minimum viable ecosystems as a strategy for launching new solutions.

11 MAY 2017
The End of Competitive Advantage
Professor Rita McGrath from Columbia Business School who is one of the leading voices in the field of strategy came and talked about how to use real option logic and discovery driven planning to manage portfolios of temporary advantages that collectively yield lasting advantage.

14 FEB 2017
Teaming for Innovation
Professor Amy Edmondson from HBS and the world’s leading expert high-performance teams lead discussions on how to effectively use teams by creating a psychologically safe environment focused on maximizing learning and innovation

11 NOV 2016
Navigating the Innovation Journey
Professor Andrew Van de Ven who is one of the leading figures in modern innovation research lead discussions on how to change processes in established organizations, and how to navigate the innovation journey that is often fraught with unforeseen challenges.

16 SEP 2016
Disruptive Innovation and Jobs to be Done
Professor Clayton M. Christensen from Harvard Business School launched his new book “Competing against luck” in Trondheim. This seminar focused on understanding the theory of disruptive innovation and how to avoid the threat of disruption by using the “jobs to be done” framework.

2025 - 2026
What´s next?
This mix of lectures, group and plenary discussions and Q&A with international thought leaders is still in full swing.
Next forum: September 21-22 2026
Key Contact for PIMS Executive Forum
- Alf Steinar Sætre, PhD, PIMS Director
- Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- (+47) 73 55 10 13
- alf.steinar@ntnu.no