We are eager to help jumpstart the careers of promising PhD candidates pursuing high-impact research in strategic management and entrepreneurship!  Our doctoral programme combines gaining an in-depth understanding of core strategy topics, developing a thorough command of different research methods and skills, and hands-on training of getting high-impact research published. Joining the PhD programme means joining a department with a highly collaborative and cutting-edge research culture in which faculty members and PhD candidates work on topics that cover nearly all domains of the wider strategic management and entrepreneurship fields.

Every academic year, we admit about three internally and several externally funded, promising doctoral candidates, who follow a range of doctoral courses, work on joint and supervised papers, and hold conference or workshop presentations. The Department welcomes excellent candidates from diverse disciplinary and national backgrounds. We look for highly motivated candidates with a strong research orientation, as evidenced, for example, by an intriguing master thesis or research article.

Testimonials

The Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship provides a vibrant and supportive environment for doctoral candidates starting their academic career. The Department stands out through its strong commitment to growing ambitious scholars with an international mindset.

Roxana Turturea - Postdoc Researcher at Aalto University

Roxana Turturea

The Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship offers exciting opportunities for PhD students to collaborate with world-class scholars, be a part in the creation of the most up-to-date knowledge, and enjoy the open, friendly, and efficient work environment.

Ruxi Wang - Assistant Professor at Renmin University of China

Ruxi Wang

My PhD education at the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship was an invaluable kick-start for my career as an academic researcher and educator. The programme trains aspiring researchers in the latest knowledge on management theories and methods and prepares one to pursue scholarship at the highest level.

Shiko Ben-Menahem - Senior Researcher and Lecturer at ETH Zürich

Shiko Ben Menahem

The Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship enables PhD students to become critical thinkers and independent researchers. These are essential attributes for a successful career in academia.

Jorien Pruijssers - Assistant Professor at McGill University

Jorien Pruijssers

My favourite part of being here is definitely the international outlook. As a PhD candidate at the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship, I have been encouraged and provided with an abundance of opportunities to discuss and exchange ideas with academics and practitioners throughout the world.

Wenjie Liu - PhD candidate

Wenjie Liu

If you love challenges and you have the flexibility to showcase your best work, the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship is the place to be. Next to being embedded in best-of-class research support and a learning environment, you will find the world’s best colleagues to work with.

S.M. Musa - PhD candidate

S.M. Musa

Why join the RSM Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship PhD?

Unique opportunity to obtain in-depth knowledge and smart research skills.

The PhD programme offers candidates a unique opportunity to obtain in-depth knowledge and smart research skills in a broad range of strategy and entrepreneurship topics. Our researchers share a passion for rigorous academic research, covering topics that are highly relevant to the business community and society at large. The strong research culture consistently leads to publications in top-tier management and organization journals.

A variety of topics in the area of strategic management and entrepreneurship.

With over 30 faculty members, we cover variety of topics in the area of strategic management and entrepreneurship particularly in areas such as: strategy, organization, and governance; strategic entrepreneurship; strategy, knowledge, and innovation; global strategy; and behavioural strategy and entrepreneurial behavior.

Faculty and PhD candidates with diverse national and cultural identities.

Our researchers have very diverse national and cultural identities. Faculty and PhD candidates originate from countries such as Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. Furthermore, scholars from around the world regularly visit the department, which further enhances the exchange of rich insights.

Working together with faculty in teams or platforms to formulate and implement research.

PhD candidates work together with faculty in teams or platforms to formulate and implement highly impactful research. PhD candidates collaborate with their supervisors and others who share an interest in the focal topics.

Internally and externally funded salary to fully cover the cost of living in the Netherlands.

Internally and externally funded PhD candidates receive a salary to fully cover their cost of living. The ERIM research institute also offers generous funding for attending courses and conferences as well as for research visits across the world.

Development of successful careers at academic institutes across the world.

Graduates from our Department have developed successful careers at academic institutes across the world, including BI Norwegian Business School, ETH Zurich, HEC, INSEAD, McGill University, Monash University, Renmin University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Cambridge, the University of Warwick, and the University of Western Australia.

More information

More Testimonials

Jochem Kroezen, Lecturer at the University of Cambridge

"The Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship Department at the Rotterdam School of Management provides an excellent environment for starting an academic career in business research. During my time as a PhD candidate with the group, I enjoyed active research support, both financially and socially. I also greatly benefitted from the group’s diverse and prolific faculty, who made sure I felt part of the group from day one. In addition, the group’s ties to other elite business schools made it easy to develop my own international network of like-minded researchers. These factors contributed greatly to the launch of my career as an academic researcher."

Sebastian Fourné, Assistant Professor at Wilfred Laurier University

“The PhD trajectory guided by the very capable and caring faculty of the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship Department has been exciting and career shaping. I considered going back to a corporate job, but my PhD supervisors and many of the colleagues in the Department made me rethink this ambition and prepared me well for a scholarly career. I found it exciting to work on novel topics and get the support and training needed to conduct rigorous research that has relevance for practice. I also value the opportunity to build lasting and supportive relationships."

Mariano Heyden, Associate Professor at Monash University

“My experience at the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship of the Rotterdam School of Management allowed me to be learn from, and collaborate closely with, some of the leading scholars in the field. I attribute a lot of my achievements to the rigorous training received, which equipped me with the conceptual and methodological toolbox that has been essential in my career, especially during my tenure track. Not only is the Rotterdam School of Management brand globally respected and opens many doors, the quality relationships forged during the PhD programme have endowed me with a rich network of peers that have gone on to have their own successful careers at other top institutions around the world.” 

Pengfei Wang, Assistant Professor at the BI Norwegian Business School

“The Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship is one of the best departments in one of the best business schools worldwide. The Department provides world-class supervisors, luxury research support, and a great academic atmosphere. The Department enables PhD candidates to combine relevance and rigor, employing rigorous methods to solve big and relevant problems for entrepreneurs, managers, and policy-makers.”

Sebastiaan van Doorn, Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia

“The PhD trajectory at the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship Department of the Rotterdam School of Management has been an extremely valuable and rewarding experience. It provided me with state-of-the-art supervisors and colleagues (as mentors, co-authors, and friends), a well-established support system (conferences and research visits) and opportunities to build my teaching portfolio. The PhD programme prepared me exceptionally well for the academic job market and is internationally renowned for delivering high-end academics.”

Research Themes

A combination of economic, political, and social forces gives rise to a wide range of organizational forms. Research in strategy, organization, and governance aims to explain and identify the mechanisms through which modern firms shape and align their organizational structures, governance and ownership with the strategies, resource dependencies, and business models through which they create and capture value. Research in our group is highly versatile, including projects investigating the re-emergence of craft organizations and state capitalism on the world stage, the competitive advantage and strategic resilience of business groups, owner-managed firms, family firms, and professional partnerships, and how active owners shape the strategies and the organizational and governance structures of listed firms across different national contexts. Our research often takes up a comparative perspective, involving both comparisons between different institutional contexts and comparisons between different organizational forms.

In today’s fast-paced environments, wealth creation demands proficiency in continuously identifying and generating new opportunities for growth. At the nexus of entrepreneurship and strategic management, research on strategic entrepreneurship is concerned with understanding how organizations link entrepreneurial behaviour and strategic advantage-seeking actions to create and capture wealth. The work in our group focuses on ambidexterity, corporate entrepreneurship, scaling up, and strategy implementation. Exemplary research addresses such aspects as: how organizations strengthen their core business while also developing new businesses that will define the future; how organizations become more entrepreneurial through the generation of new businesses within established systems and through strategic renewal; how some organizations can ignite rapid growth and scale up successfully by leveraging new technologies, establishing platforms, redefining boundaries, and developing new and scalable business models; and how new practices and technologies enable firms to implement strategies which focus on venturing into new businesses as well as strengthening their core.

New technologies and new business models reshape the way firms do business. This calls for new insights into how managers and entrepreneurs can best innovate and leverage knowledge to build competitive advantages for their firms. The field of strategy, knowledge, and innovation focuses on how managers and entrepreneurs build and renew the technological, social, and relational capital to shape such innovations. It addresses such issues as strategic renewal, innovation management, management innovation and the rise of new organizational forms, collaborative and open innovation, innovation ecosystems, and corporate venturing. Our group covers a wide range of topics in this area, such as: micro-foundations of absorptive capacity and dynamic capabilities that enable innovation; the origins of business model innovations; the implications of technological disruptions; the mechanisms of effective collaborations to achieve innovation by large incumbent firms and new ventures; and the governance and assessment of the impact of such collaborations.

The competitive landscape of firms is increasingly dynamic, diverse, and global. The field of global strategy aims to enrich our understanding of how internationally operating firms form and implement their strategies, and how firms shape, and are shaped by, their global context. It focuses on foreign-entry strategies in culturally, politically, and economically heterogeneous contexts, and ultimately on the determinants of success or failure in international arenas. Our group typically adopts an institutions-based perspective, which argues that international firms are constrained and enabled by widely diverse, durable rules of the game, as illustrated by the diverse societal expectations around competitive behaviour and sustainability performance. Exemplary research projects in our group include novel views on culture, cross-border knowledge transfer, strategic responses to institutional voids, influences of governments and other stakeholders on corporate environmental practices, cross-country and within-country variance in institutions, and international strategies of the largest companies, born-globals, and emerging-market multinationals.

Influential strategic and entrepreneurial decisions result from extraordinary human effort. Behavioural strategy and entrepreneurial behaviour inform us about the psychology behind these high-impact and complex decisions. It takes a micro-level perspective to understanding how managers and entrepreneurs create and sustain value for their organizations and stakeholders, enriching strategy and entrepreneurship theory through forefront research on human cognition, emotions, and social and innovative behaviour of entrepreneurs, executives, and their teams. Seminal research in the field comprises the behavioural theory of the firm and the upper echelons perspective, as well as pivotal work from cognitive and social psychology. Exemplary group projects explore: how top managers, boards, and shareholders embrace uncertainty; how gender affects entrepreneurial behaviour; how disinhibition (ADHD) fuels entrepreneurial orientation; how CEO personality drives firm decisions, behaviour, and outcomes; how emotion influences idea generation and exploitation; and how biases and heuristics impact strategic decisions.

Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship top publications

Frank Wijen

Frank Wijen

Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Departmental PhD Coordinator