Insights
This section serves as our community’s Flash Insights, connecting the latest academic hopefully with actionable management reality. Our recent activities emphasize the Wallenberg foundation funded project Dynamics and Success Factors of Participatory Strategy Work and feature works from Noren and University of Tampere and Turku.
Recent Seminar: Connecting Science with Practice
In March 2025, we hosted the Open Strategy Science-Practice Seminar at Aalto University’s Marsio Hall. This event marked a major milestone in our three-year national research project.
- Key Themes: The seminar explored why organizations are shifting toward inclusive strategy-making and how to design these processes to avoid "decision gridlock" or power struggles.
- Expert Contributions: * Frank Martela (Aalto University): Outlined the necessity of careful design in openness to prevent common pitfalls.
- Tuomas Syrjänen (Futurice): Demonstrated how AI and real-time data can facilitate transparency and speed in participatory strategizing.
- Eero Vaara (Oxford/Aalto): Moderated a panel of practitioners sharing "fail-forward" stories from organizations like Omnia and Fonecta.
- Core Takeaway: Open strategy is not a simple binary choice but a continuum where participation must be learned over time to grow in effectiveness.
Recent Publications & Working Papers
- Paradoxical Tensions in Open Strategy: A recent study by Martela, Vaara, and Gustafsson (published in Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings) examines how the inherent tensions of openness—such as "autonomy vs. alignment"—can actually drive strategy work forward if handled correctly.
- Microfoundations of Strategy: Work by Eero Vaara in 2024 and 2025 (e.g., in Academy of Management Collections and Journal of Management Studies) illuminates how middle managers navigate emotions to turn resistance into momentum during strategy implementation.
- Open Strategy in SMEs: Recent research from the University of Turku indicates that small and medium-sized enterprises can benefit from open practices similarly to large firms by tapping into collective intelligence for innovation.
Case Studies
Supported by the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and the Foundation of Economic Education, we are conducting deep-dive research into four unique organizational contexts:
- Reaktor & Futurice: Analyzing how "flat" organizations balance extreme decentralization with strategic coherence.
- Burning Man: Studying how a 70,000+ person community balances centralized safety planning with emergent, self-organized creativity.
- Wikimedia: Exploring how a global virtual crowd participates in setting a long-term strategic direction through open wiki platforms.
Collection of research posters from our cases
