A research seminar, prof. Antonio Davila

The Research Centre of the Faculty of Economics organized a research seminar on Wednesday, 21st October 2015 at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana.

Author: Antonio Davila, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Accounting and Control, IESE Business School, University of Navarra presented the article:

“Driving results through innovation—Sensing the world for opportunities”

“Changes in the external environment are famous for upsetting the status quo, giving rise to innovative new business models – or wrecking old ones that had previously seemed unassailable. Yet, despite the importance of looking outside the organization for potential threats or opportunities looming on the horizon, organizations seem designed to make people spend more of their time looking inside. Indeed, the primary achievement of business intelligence software, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), seems to be in giving managers fancier tools for measuring and generating datasets on every imaginable aspect of their organization’s performance. Meanwhile, the outside world – where the real opportunities and threats lie – is tracked much like it always has been: through networking events, personal contacts, news on the Internet. A manager from
the ’90s would notice little difference. Today’s organizations end up resembling cars with bigger dashboards but smaller windows. Organizations need better ways of viewing their competitive, social and political landscapes. They need larger windows and more powerful headlights to see farther down the road. They need to leverage the advances in performance measurement to sense the environment, anticipate risks and react quickly to threats and opportunities, as it is this sensing function that always precedes innovation. Strategic planning and strategic control were concepts deeply rooted in the management control tradition. Today as the relevance of management control to innovation has become accepted in the research community, these concepts are gaining relevance. The seminar will provide an overview of the evolution of the research at the intersection of management control and innovation to suggest potential avenues for research and how new designs of management control systems are being developed to sense innovation opportunities.”

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