Innovation

We have close ties with colleagues in operations management, digital marketing, finance, accounting, responsible business, and large-scale infrastructure programme management.  We work closely with faculty and researchers in the Oxford Internet Institute, the Blavatnik School of Government, the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, the Technology & Management Centre for Development, and with affiliated researchers in the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.

Members of the group serve as editors, associate editors, and editorial board members of key journals in strategy, management theory, social innovation and social entrepreneurship. We also serve as special issue editors for recent journal themes on sustainable business models, services innovation, social innovation, and business model innovation.

Our research approaches core questions of innovation in the context of industries and sectors being re-imagined and transformed. 

We have a robust interest in social innovation and social entrepreneurship and conduct pioneering work on hybrid forms, processes, and logics.  We engage with new questions in finance which explore new tools, products and conceptions of finance for social impact, and actively engage with social policy issues around impact and innovation. We support studies that overlap with colleagues in global strategy and international business on emerging value and commodity chains, on concepts like the ‘Circular Economy’, building institutional capacity in developing economies, and in responding to global ‘grand challenges’ in climate change adaptation, sustainability, Fourth Industrial Revolution governance and policy, and innovation policy.

Our research contributes to the lively, current conversation ‘Oxford on Strategy’, a distributed research and teaching initiative that has staked out an agenda for shared work among the faculty in the School. This strategy aims to open up questions about firms, as well as public agencies and civil society organisations, and seeks to define and animate studies of wider ecosystems. It attends to standard profit metrics, in addition to alternative metrics of performance which illuminate social good and commonwealth, impact, and sustainable performance.