In June 2024, the School of Management will be hosting EURAM 24, the annual conference for the European Academy of Management. Conference co-chair Dr Panos Desyllas explains how we’re now seeking paper submissions around how innovation can be used to tackle Grand Challenges.
Innovation has always been a significant enabler of value creation, improved competitiveness and economic growth. It has also contributed to the taming of the impact of long-standing Grand Challenges: most notably, our ageing society, environmentally unsustainable economic growth and the health impacts of climate change. These are important issues, as they have been blamed for causing economic inequality, social injustice and jeopardising quality of life.
Although their development has helped to alleviate the impact of many of these long-standing problems, the advance and adoption of new and emerging technologies – such as big data, artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles – have created new challenges, many of which are of an ethical nature. The advent of these advances poses dilemmas about the ownership and use of data; privacy concerns relating to face recognition; concerns about the devaluation of existing skills and infrastructure; and the risks of spreading misinformation and threatening security.
The high opportunity cost of not addressing these long-standing and new challenges begs the question: how can innovation help to solve major challenges without creating new ones? To answer this question, business organisations, their key stakeholders, governments, and the academic community can collaborate to develop new solutions and ensure that innovation is responsible and ethical. This may require moving beyond ‘traditional’ forms of innovation to include organisational, business models, social and responsible innovation.
As a result, there are fruitful opportunities for management scholars to deliver impactful research on the managerial, organisational and policy challenges inherent in developing the requisite innovations.
The conference programme features keynote speeches, panel discussions and paper presentations, as well as ample opportunities for networking and informal conversations.
So far, the response to the call for topics and symposia has been overwhelming. We received 67 topic proposals and a record 48 symposium proposals. We now welcome you to submit your research papers by 11 January 2024.
We look forward to an exciting and productive EURAM 2024 conference at here Bath.
Respond
