It was a bold decision to hold the Academy of Management Annual Conference – an event that usually brings together more than 10,000 people from all over the world to a single location, virtually. But the leadership (all volunteers) along with several volunteers from across the world made it happen. A big thank you to each one of them. In about a week, thousands of individuals exchanged useful, insightful, encouraging, inspiring, instructive, and usable knowledge. As one who was at the receiving end of such wisdom, I am in gratitude to all those who enabled this knowledge transmission.
I enjoyed attending the sessions from the comfort of my office and home. I could attend sessions that I would have otherwise skipped (imagine dashing from one hotel to another in the middle of summer). And I don’t have to explain how ‘dashing’ would look for people (academics) who normally don’t dash from place to place (exceptions exist). While not meeting old friends, and not making new friends, is something I truly missed, there was a different value created in this virtual edition. I believe this virtual conference has opened up the possibilities for blended conference modes in the future. Imagination can only be the upside for such possibilities.
I attended several PDWs and took away many applicable tips. Particularly, I enjoyed the PDWs on ‘New ways of seeing theory’ by the editors and authors of Organization Theory (a new journal from EGOS) – it provided several new approaches to theorizing without data; the workshop on ‘Writing Theoretical Papers’ from the editors of Academy of Management Review (AMR) – provided and reinforced many good practices on writing a good conceptual article; ‘Publishing Inductive Qualitative Research in Prominent Management Journals’ by Melissa Graebner, Davide Ravasi and Quy Huy (authors whose work I admire) – an amazing two-hour Q&A session, most nicely summarized as the attempts to decipher the mystery of writing a qualitative article (borrowing Quy Huy’s analogy to detectives); and the plenary session of the ENT Division which focused on ‘The Future of Entrepreneurship’ (organized and presented by mentors and friends) – fascinating to hear the uncertainty associated with the discipline that studies it.
I also attended the PDW on ‘Scaling up Accelerator Research’ where i listened to inspirational seniors, met with old friends, and engaged in small breakout discussions on topics close to what I have studied earlier. It was nice to see Shaker Zahra talk about the importance of exploring the phenomenon of Corporate Accelerators further. This was encouraging given my interests in the phenomenon.
Driven by my new and growing interest in sustainable entrepreneurship, I dropped into the session ‘Applying Degrowth for Organizing Business in the Anthropocene’ (which helped me learn about a new topic and landed me a few new friends). The world has always faced several grand challenges, but ensuring that we have a habitable planet is even grander today. Exploring the antithesis to what most of management scholars study (growth), the discussions around degrowth were both illuminating and insightful. I left the session with more questions than answers.
Personally, this virtual edition of the 80th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, has been special in two additional ways:
a) BEST PAPER: one of my papers (co-authored with Einar Rasmussen and Hooman 
Abootorabi) was one of the Entrepreneurship Division’s Best Papers
b) BEST REVIEWER: I was recognized as one of Entrepreneurship Division’s best reviewers
Thank you Entrepreneurship Division and the entire Academy of Management family for the encouragement and support. Additionally, I also wish to thank my colleagues at Nord University who constantly support me in pursuing my scholarly interests. Overall it has been an exciting virtual AOM and I very much look forward to the next AOM, hopefully at a physical location.
Raj's Lab 