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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.