Dear Colleagues:

With great enthusiasm we request the honor of your presence at the SMS 2016 Special Conference in Rome!

In convening this Special Conference, we draw on the success of the 2010 SMS Annual Conference, as well as the eternal city’s time-honored position of being the gateway to multiple cultures and peoples. Rome’s prominent history attracts wide intellectual attention in a diverse variety of fields, such as arts, science, and spirituality. Since its founding in 753 BC, the city’s history spans nearly three millennia. It is Italy’s capital city; a world’s religious center that hosts St. Peter’s Square, the Sistine Chapel, and the Vatican City State; the third most visited city in the European Union; and is listed as one of the twenty most visited cities on earth. It has the status of a global city and its unique historic center, with the Coliseum and a wealth of distinctive Roman vestiges, is a UNESCO world heritage site.

In this conference, we are looking at some of the twenty-first century’s most fundamental challenges in the strategic management realm: exploring the interfaces of innovation, entrepreneurship, and coopetition. In essence, we shall try to respond to a range of momentous questions. Since entrepreneurial communities foster open communication, creativity, experimentation, intellectual curiosity, and tolerate failure as well as celebrate successes, how are they organized? What type of organizational structure and management practices are most conducive to absorbing knowledge from competitors? How do technological forces drive the process of coopetition? How can entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial managers benefit from pursuing coopetition strategies? What are the main enablers of cooperation and coopetition in creative industries? How is it possible to support value creation and value appropriation in creative business models? How differences in culture and approach between partners affect cooperation and coopetition in creative industries?

We hope to see a good mix of proposal submissions that contain both theoretical approaches and empirical analyses dealing with these significant questions, as well as represent a diverse crowd of researchers and institutions from around the world. The Rome conference will present the opportunity to discuss the active junctions of innovation, entrepreneurship, and coopetition with established scholars and experienced practitioners in a striking set of stimulating sessions on state-of-the-art prowess, undertaking, and investigations. Its doctoral consortium will offer young scholars the possibility to investigate issues that rest at the very edge of today’s strategic management research.

You are invited to join us for an exciting program that will expose attendees to a fascinating combination of tradition and modern vitality in one of the most mesmerizing city’s on the planet.

See you in Rome!!

	Jay Barney University of Utah
	Paolo Boccardelli Luiss Business School
	Giovanni Battista Dagnino University of Catania
	Valentina Della Corte University of Naples Federico II
	Devi Gnyawali Virginia Tech