Rajshree’s Letter to CCC Community

Dear Friends,

It is with great honor and humility that I take on the responsibility of being the organizer of the Consortium on Competitiveness and Cooperation (CCC). We miss Steven Klepper in so many ways! His thought leadership will live on through our continued scholarship. CCC represented to Steven not only his own intellectual community and home, but a true labor of love.

Steven certainly left very big shoes to fill, but also provided me with lots of insights, advice and a wish list for the future of CCC.  I intend to honor his wishes, which can be summarized by a desire for sustained “intellectual vibrancy of the CCC community!”

There are many components to what makes a vibrant community.  Let me elaborate on just a few:

• Energy and Engagement:  Over the last 20 years, the CCC annual conferences have epitomized energy and engagement.  Be it the presenting doctoral students or the mentoring faculty, there is no question that the day and a half of doctoral consortium activities is intense!
• Connectivity and Support: Creating and maintaining strong connections within the community requires tireless effort and support by many.  As I look at the history of CCC, I am both amazed and touched by the dedication of several core faculty and institutions.  Steven fondly and gratefully remembered the years when many faculty provided funds out of their own personal accounts to support the annual conferences.  This provided an important bridge between when the Sloan Foundation support drew to a close, and when the Kauffman Foundation generously stepped in. The host institutions of course have undertaken a significant portion of the burden, not only in terms of matching financial support, but in the critical handling of the nitty-gritty details of successful event planning.
• Growth and Renewal: Vibrancy is also reflected by growth and renewal.  The CCC community has grown from a fledging self-organization of a few faculty and universities to an established and diversified network representing leading programs in strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship. The introduction of Faculty Day on Friday a few years ago is reflective of our renewal efforts—these sessions represent discussion led by expert panelists on topics of interest to the community, where we learn from each other.
• Pay it Forward!  Perhaps the biggest factor underlying the vibrancy of the CCC community is the premise of “Pay it Forward.” Alumni from prior CCC conferences loyally return as faculty and organizers, both reminiscing about their own doctoral student debut and relishing their responsibility as mentors to a new generation.

So, where do we go from here? Certainly, we will continue in the strong tradition already in place, in all the features described above.  I also highlight a few changes that you may come to expect:

The CCC website:  Thanks to Peter Murmann, we have now developed a stable online home for the CCC conference.  I encourage you to peruse its various pages at http://ccc.strategy-and-entrepreneurship.net/  Chris Tucci has served as the unofficial photographer for many of the past CCC events, and has graciously shared his photo album with us.  Of course, the 20^th anniversary celebration, and our honoring of Steven Klepper is available on the website as well—these should all take you down warm memory lanes!

We also want the CCC website to serve as an important resource for students.  So, please help us by contributing to build the content of the website!  Your help can come in a variety of ways:  if you were a panelist or a discussant in prior CCC events, please consider sharing your slides.  Or you may want to post some reflections.  In between our annual gatherings, the website will serve as a platform for us to maintain the energy and engagement through worthwhile connections.  Please connect with either Peter or me with your ideas.

Leadership and Support Team: There are two main changes here. First, Will Mitchell, Scott Stern, Mary Tripsas and Chris Tucci have kindly agreed to serve as my informal ‘board of advisors,’ and I will rely on them to provide me with insights and advice on issues impacting the CCC community.

Second, the organizing committee in any one year will include members from the current host institution, and the lead faculty host from the school that will host CCC the following year. This change will help with the transition across host institutions and inter-temporal learning.

Registration and Submission Process:  With the help of the leadership and support team, I am balancing the needs of maintaining the “small conference feel” and tight budgetary constraints of CCC with its ever-growing intellectual base of scholars.

We will continue to keep the conference as an invitation sent to member faculty, to attend and to nominate students. However, an expanded member list implies a potential excess demand situation.  Thus, we encourage you to register and confirm your attendance early, even before the deadline that has now moved to December 15 of the year preceding the conference.  To aid with the logistics and event planning, the doctoral student nomination deadline has been moved to the same date as well.  More details for CCC 2014 are forthcoming shortly—please be on the lookout for the invitation letter (to ensure that it is not spam filtered!) from ccc2014@bu.edu.

I look forward to hearing from you, and importantly, seeing you at Boston University for CCC 2014.

Warm regards,

Rajshree