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Sally Davenport
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
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The Academy of Management Annual Meeting
New Orleans, August 6-11 2004
Attending a conference of over 6000 people is daunting at the best of times (so many parallel sessions at once - how does once chose?) let alone when it is spread over 5 hotels in the heart of downtown (and very steamy) New Orleans in August. Distractions abounded as Louisiana has lots of interesting sites, sounds and tastes on offer and Bourbon Street was certainly a favourite haunt in the evenings - catching Mardi Gras beads and dodging thunderstorms. And the conference was interesting too!
The Academy of Management boasts about 14,000 members from 93 countries each of whom belong to a couple of the 21 subject divisions (one of which is the Technology and Innovation Management division, TIM) and 3 interest groups. It is a very strong 'academic' association with only 7% of members being business people, no doubt many of whom belong to the Management Consulting Division.
The Academy of Management Conference runs over six days but is split into to separate sections. The first three days are for 'professional development' activities, including PhD and junior faculty consortiums (very interesting if you are a new academic for contrasting different academic systems/careers), and various other more informal chances to meet for workshops and themed sessions. In addition there is a heavily patronised placement service for academic jobs.
The second half of the conference consists of symposia and paper sessions, for which papers and proposals are submitted in early January each year. The acceptance rate is about 30% of submissions and 10% of the papers are selected for the proceedings volumes. This year 55 countries were represented in the 1200 sessions. Other interesting types of presentation include the 'visual' sessions during which posters are discussed with authors by browsing visitors. Unlike many conferences, these sessions are well attended and give far more chance for discussion than the brief time after paper presentations. During this time, the largest Management academic book, journal and software exhibition (at least that I have seen) also takes place.
Another interesting new feature is the 'Academy Arts and the 'Fringe Café' which run in tandem. The former provides for the more artistically creative members of the academy who like to express their ideas visually or poetically. The 'Fringe Café' is an 'open space for the informal exchange of ideas, theory and practice in an aesthetically provocative environment' and included the production of a play with management themes.
Because this conference is regarded by many as the premier Management conference, it provides a great opportunity to see some 'big names' in action throughout the programme. The list of such names is long and their plenary-type sessions are usually packed out quickly. However, it is also not uncommon to find a well-known (guru) academic presenting in the smaller paper sessions as well.
The Academy of Management is not a conference to attend if you are interested in small intimate in-depth discussions. Much of the interesting discussion happens in the corridors and local eating establishments as many of the attendees use the conference to catch up with research colleagues. In fact, navigating your way around the programme is a major project in itself, let alone finding the particular session you want to attend. Invariably there are always half a dozen sessions that look interesting but that are on at exactly the same time at hotels in opposite directions! Luckily the programme also includes email addresses for chasing up on that paper that you missed!
The 2005 Academy of Management conference will be held in Hawaii so there is good reason to have a strong 'Pacific' turnout. More information can be found on www.aomonline.org/.
IAMOT: 13th International Conference on Management of Technology
3-7 April 2004, Washington DC, USA
This is the official conference of the International Association for the Management of Technology (IAMOT), a professional organization founded by Professor Tarek Khalil (University of Miami) devoted to the education, research and application of technology management. The first IAMOT conference was held in Miami in 1988 and it has been attracting a range of academic and practitioner MoT participants to its (now) annual conferences, with the location moving around the world, ever since.
This year's conference had the theme 'New Directions in Technology Management: Changing Collaboration between Government, Industry and University' and happened to be timed to coincide with the annual blossom festival in Washington DC (and a student debating competition being held in the same hotel). A vast array of papers were presented in 19 different tracks ranging from Knowledge Management to Theory of Technology - abstracts and some papers are available on line at the IAMOT website, www.iamot.org. Three professional development tutorials were offered prior to the conference on Scanning New technologies for Strategic Opportunities, Total Productivity Management and Technology Policies and Business Strategies.
Plenary sessions included several interesting practitioner presentations, such as that delivered by Jan Jackman (GM with IBM) on 'Retail on Demand' and Jan Aase (Director of GM's Product Development Research Laboratory) on 'GM Research and Development Globalization', as well as forums on MOT Education (focusing on the US) and a discussion on the desirability of starting (dare I say yet another) journal. The social highlight was the IAMOT Annual Award Banquette, at which Distinguished Achievement Awards were presented to Daniel Berg and Graham Mitchell (former US Assistant Secretary of Commerce). Thirty 'Prolific Researcher Awards' were given to researchers who had published the most number of articles between 1998 and 2002 in a selection of MoT journals, and the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management Best Paper Award was presented (details and photos of awardees are on the IAMOT website).
Unlike many other conferences that academic readers might attend, the IAMOT conference is strongly practitioner oriented as is evident in the number of speakers in both plenaries and tracks from organizations such as NASA, Sandia, GM and IBM. The majority of papers are about improving organizational processes and new or adapted methods (as opposed to developing theory, for example) so this conference will be particular attractive to those that wish to interact closely with practitioner issues. Apart from the fact that the registration desk could have done with a little bit of improved process management itself and that a few of the plenary speakers did not arrive (always an issue with busy practitioners) the conference proceeded relatively smoothly.
The next (14th) IAMOT conference will be held in Vienna (May 22-26 2005) in collaboration with the United Nations International Development Organization (UNIDO). The 15th conference, with the theme 'East meets West: Challenges and Opportunities in the Era of Globalization', will be hosted by the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, Beijing, May 22-26 2006. The calls for papers for both conferences are available at www.iamot.org.
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