Henk Volberda and Justin Jansen keep up with international publications

The professors are both researchers in RSM’s Department of Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship. The recognition shows that peers in the field heavily cite the papers that Volberda and Jansen have authored or co-authored, for example on entrepreneurship, absorptive capacity, ambidextrous organisations, management innovation, strategic flexibility and co-evolution.

Prof. Justin Jansen in 2018

“I feel delighted about the idea that so many scholars are actually using and applying my work,” says Professor Jansen. “Publishing articles in top-tier journals is one thing, but receiving so many citations and seeing how your article leads to lively debates in the literature is another thing. It is great to see that all my efforts and hard work over the years pay off in this sense.”

Prof. Justin Jansen focuses on uncovering and understanding emergent phenomena; matters that pose important challenges to entrepreneurs and managers. For example, his team’s stream of work on organisational ambidexterity, or the necessity for organisations to bridge today and tomorrow, or to exploit current competences while exploring new capabilities. He says he sees how organisations struggle with this paradox and is passionate to find out how organisations may be able to address this inherent challenge.

“I take an outside-in approach and try to bring in emergent phenomena into my research and teaching. Much comes back to my inherent desire to signal what will be important in the coming years. Not looking back and see what happened, but to envision what will be the next big thing and try to build a community of scholars around certain topics and domains,” said the professor of corporate entrepreneurship.

Scale-ups are also an area of interest for Prof. Jansen. These fast-growing organisations are important for the vitality of economies, he says, not only in terms of job creation but also in transforming economies. He works together with the Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship to get more attention for the importance of scale-ups among the general public and policy makers. Every year, they launch the ScaleUp Dashboard and compile the top 250 growth companies. Research-wise, he is part of several case studies at well-known scale-ups in the Netherlands such as Takeaway, Coolblue and YoungCapital to understand the sources of their massive growth and to identify their leadership and management capabilities to sustain fast growth over time.

Prof. Henk Volberda in 2018

Professor Henk Volberda’s co-authored paper on how Ericsson responded to technological disruption was published in a special edition of Journal of Management Studies in 2018, and another paper on the roles of top versus middle line management on realising management innovations was in the Journal of Management. He has also been working as a guest editor on two special issues, one on strategising in the digital era for Long Range Planning, and another one on business model innovation in transforming economies for Management and Organization Review.

For Prof. Volberda it’s also a recognition of the high-quality research and thought-leadership in Erasmus Centre for Business Innovation. Volberda’s team finished a report on real-life experiments in several large firms on management innovation funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. They have also been involved in the Erasmus Innovation Monitor, the Harbor Innovation Monitor, and an executive opinion survey for the World Economic Forum that provides the input for the Global Competitiveness Index and the Global Gender Gap Index.

As part of a PhD project, Prof. Volberda was also involved in studying how European banks adopt FinTech technologies and the role in this adoption process of different audiences such as regulators, peers, the field and the public. This PhD (Tatjana Schneidmuller) received a best paper award at the European Academy of Management and was included in the AOM Best Paper Proceedings.

In addition to journal publications, Prof. Volberda co-authored the book Re-inventing Business Models: How firms cope with disruption (Oxford University Press) with Prof. Frans van den Bosch and Dr Kevin Heij.