What do leading scholars at the intersection of radical innovation and strategic leadership research think about where the field is heading to? In a new perspective published in Research Policy (VHB A, FT 50), Prof. Dr. Dr. Lorenz Graf-Vlachy of FAU’s Chair of Strategic Management and Leadership teamed up with Sarosh Asad (University of Groningen), Mariano Heyden (Monash University), Elizabeth J. Altman (University of Massachusetts Lowell), Don C. Hambrick (Penn State University), Zeki Simsek (Clemson University), and Mary Tripsas (UC Santa Barbara) and to assess where the fields of strategic leadership and radical innovation stand individually and where they might be headed together. They identify four shifts in contemporary organizing that matter for future research: structurally, innovation is migrating from firms to ecosystems; technologically, AI is transforming both the creative process and the cognitive conditions of leadership; relationally, permeable boundaries are redistributing influence across actors; and culturally, evaluative criteria are expanding from performance to purpose.
The publication is available in open access here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2026.105579