The field of strategic management is a trending topic in academia. It provides tools to key decision-makers examining governmental policies, and a framework for thinking strategically about tangentially related areas of study.

That’s why Jay Barney and Todd Zenger — two highly acclaimed professors in the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business — felt compelled to organize and host a gathering of more than 100 of the world’s senior strategic managers.

Rich Langlois, Professor of Economics from the University of Connecticut and an attendee of the 2024 Strategy Summit, had a succinct description of the conference.

“This is one of the most amazing collections of smart people that I’ve seen in a while,” he said. “They managed to bring together some of the absolutely top people.”

The 2024 Strategy Summit, which took place early August at the Stein Eriksen Lodge at Deer Valley Resort in Park City, was just the third of its kind since the emergence of the field, and the first to occur in more than three decades.

The initial one took place at the University of Pittsburgh in May 1977, and the second was in Napa Valley, Calif., in Nov. 1990.

Several attendees noted that the extended passage of time and the intervening advances in strategic management meant that another Summit was long overdue, and praised Barney, Zenger, and the Eccles School for making it happen.

“It’s been over 30 years since we had something similar, and the field had evolved so much [in the interim],” said Heli Wang, Dean of the College of Graduate Research Studies and the Janice Bellace Professor of Strategic Management at Singapore Management University. “In some ways, there have been very positive developments, and in others, it’s not so clear where we should go next. So, it’s very timely for these great minds to get together and have these important discussions.”

To that end, there were 10 panel sessions aimed at tackling those very issues, with subjects ranging from the impact of artificial intelligence to the relationship between corporate strategy and governmental industrial policy.

Anita McGahan, a Professor of Strategic Management and the George E. Connell Chair in Organizations & Society at the University of Toronto, as well as one of the 2024 Strategy Summit panel leaders, noted that establishing the future of the field was paramount.

“This is the most important meeting in the field of strategy in decades. It’s really about setting an agenda for the next generation of scholarship in this area,” said McGahan. “The goal is to revisit our foundations and to really think about what’s important and how we can update our agenda to reflect the challenges in the world around us.”

Several attendees suggested that the sole priority is not merely finding the next academic frontiers of strategic management, but to translate their abstract constructs into something more consistently empirical, practical, and applicable.

Having many of the field’s top minds in the same place at the same time provided an opportunity to dive into those uncharted waters and plot a course.

“That’s where the summit comes in — you’ve got 150 people all trying different ways to make it happen,” said Gautam Ahuja, the Eleanora and George Landew Professor of Management at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business. “Some ideas will work well, some won’t work well, some will need to be adapted; [but] this is a body of people who will do the work.”

Barney and Zenger were pleased with how the event played out, noting it was worthwhile not only as an intellectual endeavor, but in boosting the prestige of the University of Utah.

“Sometimes scholars are so busy doing their research that they don’t have the time to step back and think more broadly about their discipline. The Strategy Summit gave almost 140 of the leading scholars in strategic management an opportunity to do just that — to consider how our field has evolved and how it should evolve going forward,” said Barney. “The conversations that began at the Summit are likely to have a profound effect on research in strategic management for decades to come. It also helped solidify the reputation of the Entrepreneurship and Strategy department at the Eccles School of Business as one of the leading strategy groups in the world.”