EURAM award for Tatjana Schneidmüller at Reykjavik conference
ERIM PhD candidate Tatjana Schneidmüller from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) won an EURAM 2018 Best Paper Award in the Strategic Management Special Interest Group for her management research. Schneidmüller, whose paper explores incumbent response to discontinuous change, received the award at the annual conference of the European Academy of Management (EURAM), which took place in Reykjavik, Iceland, in June 2018.
Tatjana Schneidmüller from RSM’s Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship co-wrote the paper with Associate Professor Mariano L.M. Heyden from Monash Business School, Melbourne, Australia, and Professor Henk W. Volberda from RSM.
Discontinuous change
They received the 2018 EURAM Best Paper Award in the Strategic Responsiveness and Adaptive Organizations Track. Their paper Audience engagement as a legitimizing driver of technological discontinuity adoption deals with how commercial banks in Europe are adapting to the disruption caused by the rise of FinTech.
Schneidmüller focuses on incumbent firms’ strategic responses to competence-destroying technological discontinuities. She and her co-authors found that incumbents facing a significant degree of uncertainty associated with discontinuous change, such as FinTech in financial services, cannot only rely on their internal firm and managerial characteristics to determine adequate adaptive response, but in fact, pay attention to how different social audiences, such as their peers, the professional field, the public, and regulators, engage with the discontinuity.
Audience engagement
The researchers observed that audience engagement, the attention and opinions of external groups, matter. Yet, the degree to which it matters varies across audiences. Their main findings suggest that incumbents respond predictably to the positive and negative engagement of the public and regulators. But, positive engagement from peer competitors and field experts are negatively related to FinTech initiatives by incumbents.
