Department of Strategy

Randi Lunnan

Head of department Randi Lunnan

The Department of Strategy is an active, leading and innovative academic centre that develops and communicates expertise within the discipline of strategy.

The Department runs courses on the BSc, MSc and PhD levels, as well as courses aimed at the experience-based Executive market. Several of the Department’s faculty members teach business leaders at the MBA and Executive Master of Management at BI’s recognised partner institutions abroad, such as Fudan University in Shanghai and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

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Modern and relevant teaching methods

The Department focuses on new, digital teaching methods. For example, a strategy tournament was developed for third-year Bachelor of Science in Business students, which encouraged the students to compete to win. In addition to the tournament, videos were also made where executives in various companies presented real strategic challenges they had faced, which has provided the course with valuable business relevance.

Research

The Department places significant focus on research and is regularly published in relevant and recognised scientific journals. Several of the Department’s research projects are related to industrial competitiveness. The goal is to contribute to highlighting various industries’ significance in the Norwegian economy, as well as the possibilities and challenges in connection with value creation within some of the most important industries in Norway. The Department is also involved in a number of international collaboration projects. Innovative Nordics, which is a research collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics, is a unique mapping of industry clusters that span across national borders in Norway and Sweden.

Through the Department’s Centre for the Construction Industry, an academic partner in Klima 2020, BI is also an SFI (Centre for Research-based Innovation) that focuses on strategic change for climate adaptation of buildings and infrastructure.

Three doctorates were completed in 2015 within the PhD specialisation in strategic management. The new doctors Ieva Martinkenaitė-Pujanauskienė, Katja M. Hydle and Lene Pettersen, were all PhD candidates at the Department of Strategy.

International environment

The Department has a strong focus on international recruitment. The faculty represents eight nationalities, as Assistant Professors, Adjunct Professors and Associate Professors/Professors.

The Department also actively organises a series of seminars featuring international strategy researchers. The Department also hosted several guest lecturers during 2015.

Distinctions in 2015:

  • Professor Gabriel R.G. Benito was elected as a Fellow in the Academy of International Business (AIB).
  • Harvard Business School (HBS) awarded Professor Rolv Petter Amdam the prestigious Alfred D. Chandler Jr International Visiting Scholar Fellowship in connection with a research stay at HBS in the autumn of 2015.
  • Adjunct Professor Ulf Andersson won the International Business Review (IBR) Best Journal Paper of the Year Award for the article (w/ Alessandra Perri) “Knowledge outflows from foreign subsidiaries and the tension between knowledge creation and knowledge protection: Evidence from the semiconductor industry”.

Selected publications:

  • Amdam, R.P. & Bjarnar, O. Globalization and the development of industrial clusters: Comparing two Norwegian clusters, 1900–2010. Business History Review.
  • Andersson, U., Gaur, A., Mudambi, R. & Persson, M. Unpacking inter-unit knowledge transfer in multinational enterprises. Global Strategy Journal.
  • Hydle, K.M. (2015). Temporal and spatial dimensions of strategizing. Organization Studies.
  • Junni, P., Sarala, R., Tarba, S. & Weber, Y. The role of strategic agility in acquisitions. British Journal of Management Martinkenaite-Pujanauskiene, I. & Breunig, K.J. The emergence of absorptive capacity through micro-macro level interactions. Journal of Business Research.

There are four research centres in the Department

  • Centre for the Construction Industry (Head: Lena Bygballe)
  • Centre for Management of Telecom and Network Industry (Head: Øystein Fjeldstad)
  • Centre for Technology Strategy (Head: Espen Andersen)
  • Centre for Risk and Insurance Research (Head: Johannes Brinkmann)

Two endowed professorships are associated with the Department

  • The Telenor Chair of International Strategy and Management (Øystein Fjeldstad)
  • Shipowner Tom Wilhelmsen’s Foundation Chair in Strategy and Industrial Competitiveness (Torger Reve)