All Previous Executive Forums

  • Program in Innovation Management and Innovation Strategy

    Corporate Innovation in Focus

  • 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.

ALL Executive Forum Speakers - Innovation and Strategy

Rita McGrath 2025
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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Jackson Nickerson 2023
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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Hila Lifshitz-Assaf 2023
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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Jackson Nickerson 2022
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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Georg von Krogh 2022
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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Rita McGrath 2019
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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Amy Edmondsen 2019
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.
Wendy Smith 2019
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.
Marshall Van Alstyne 2018
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.
Amy Edmondsen
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.
Paul Verdin
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.
Roberto Verganti
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
Ron Adner
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.
Rita McGrath
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.
Amy Edmondson
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
Andy Van de Ven
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.
 Clayton M. Christensen
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.
new?
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

Innovation - Call to Action - set no. 2 - for previous forums page only

Contact - Executive forum in innovation

Key Contact for PIMS Executive Forum