Explore our knowledge

An­drew Ink­pen

Professor

Subjects
Strategy Energy

My re­search deals with in­ter­est­ing and rel­ev­ant ques­tions in in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness

Andrew Inkpen holds a part-time professorship at CBS.  He is the Seward Chair in Global Strategy, Emeritus at Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University. His Ph.D. degree is from Ivey Business School, Western University.  He has taught at Ivey Business School, Temple University, National University of Singapore and has been a visiting professor at Nanyang Technological University and European Business School.  Andrew’s research and teaching focus on global strategy and international business.  He has extensive experience in executive education and has written more than 70 teaching cases. Much of his current research deals with the global energy industry and how firms are managing the energy transition. 

Recent research projects

To Drill or Not to Drill: Bal­an­cing Ex­plor­a­tion and Ex­ploit­a­tion in an In­dustry in Trans­ition

The fields of strategy and or­gan­iz­a­tion­al the­ory de­scribe or­gan­iz­a­tions as per­petu­ally en­gaged in find­ing a bal­ance between the de­mands ori­gin­at­ing in their ex­tern­al en­vir­on­ments and the cap­ab­il­it­ies and re­sources with­in their in­tern­al en­vir­on­ments. This elu­sive equi­lib­ri­um be­comes even more tenu­ous dur­ing peri­ods of en­vir­on­ment­al change and dis­con­tinu­ity when or­gan­iz­a­tions seek to bal­ance their fo­cus between ex­ploit­a­tion activ­it­ies to lever­age in­cum­bent skills, cap­ab­il­it­ies and re­sources, against ex­ploit­a­tion activ­it­ies to at­tempt to forge new sources of com­pet­it­ive ad­vant­age. This study ex­plores the ten­sions between ex­plor­a­tion and ex­ploit­a­tion with­in the oil and gas in­dustry, which is part of the glob­al en­ergy sys­tem that is in the throes of a ma­jor trans­formation.

On the Value of Study­ing the Ab­s­cence of Stra­tegic Al­li­ances

This study ad­dresses a crit­ic­al chal­lenge in stra­tegic man­age­ment re­search: A tend­ency to frame re­search with­in es­tab­lished paradigms, the­or­et­ic­al and meth­od­o­lo­gic­al bound­ar­ies, which con­strains the emer­gence of nov­el con­cepts. Fo­cus­ing on the concept of “ab­sence”—the non-oc­cur­rence of ex­pec­ted events or phe­nom­ena and the ap­pear­ance of un­ex­pec­ted ones—the re­search pro­poses such an an­om­aly as a power­ful but un­der re­searched trig­ger for identi­fy­ing so far ig­nored phe­nom­ena, for gen­er­at­ing new hy­po­theses, and for fos­ter­ing new the­or­et­ic­al in­sights in the con­text of ab­duct­ive reas­on­ing.