Arun has developed and offered executive education workshops on supply chain management and digital innovation. He has customized these workshops to the needs of the organizations using in-depth engagement with them. As an example, he worked closely with the United Parcel Service to develop a custom executive workshop series on how digital enablement of supply chains can be used to co-create value with customers. The workshop was taken by over 1,000 executives at senior and middle management levels in marketing, sales, IT, new product development, operations, and business development and was rated to be among the most successful executive education offerings at United Parcel Service.

The workshop focuses on the changing landscape for the sourcing and generation of research data, identifying and safeguarding against risks in working with big data, leveraging text analytics to measure complex constructs, combining machine learning with econometric approaches to uncover heterogeneous treatment effects, and the design of large-scale randomized online experiments.

These workshops are targeted at Ph.D. students and faculty in business disciplines interested in learning how to formulate and conduct research so as to surface a theoretical contribution. Based on the target audience, workshops are customized in scope of coverage and duration.

Topics covered include:

  • Formulating research problems to derive research questions that matter (grounding, situating, and diagnosing problems; evaluating the level of abstraction at which to formulate a research problem, managing the tension between an immediate practical problem and an overarching scientific problem)
  • Effectively synthesizing the literature based on strategic choices related to scholarly conversations and perspectives salient to the problem formulation
  • Differentiating between variance and process models
  • Theorizing different types of variance models (moderation, mediation, combination of mediation and moderation, nonlinear relationships, configurations)
  • Achieving correspondence between theoretical arguments and the specifications of variance and process models
  • Leveraging the role of context in the theory building process
  • Developing multilevel models to bridge micro and macro perspectives
  • Leveraging the role of time to surface theoretical contributions
  • Achieving synergies between big data and theory through research design and analytics

Cumulatively, the workshop is oriented to develop an overarching understanding of crucial, often-overlooked interdependencies in the research process. It provides the necessary understanding of the key choices to be made and strategies that can be applied in the research process to achieve theoretical contribution and synergies between theory and empirics.

There is a need for business executives at all levels of an organization to understand how discrete changes in a nexus of information technologies (IT)—storage, mobile, social media, analytics, internet of things, and artificial intelligence—are generating unprecedented opportunities, while introducing new risks, in digital innovations that can create value in business and society. This nexus of complementary technologies is leading to digital innovation in a range of areas including: market mechanisms; the traceability of behaviors, social networks, and choices; the processes of collaboration; real-time prediction of behaviors and outcomes; experimentation to generate feedback about market response to innovations in products/services and processes; and business models. It requires business professionals, both working in well-established organizations and in startups, to understand how digital innovation can be leveraged to design products, services, business models, and processes. Workshops are customized to align with the objectives of firms and their managers.

The workshops are designed to provide authors with (1) feedback from MISQ Senior Editors and Associate Editors on potential submissions to MISQ and (2) the opportunity to discuss with editors and other authors how to develop papers for submission and resubmission to MISQ. Authors learn how to avoid Type III errors in the formulation of their research. Designed and offered MISQ Author Development Workshops at San Diego (2016), Boston (2017), New Orleans (2018), Xi’an (2019), Cancun (2019), and in a virtual format (2020).

The objective of these workshops is to coach participants who have reviewed, or are interested in reviewing, for MISQ or other outlets on how to develop a virtuous review. The workshop is designed to provide participants in the workshop with (1) feedback from MISQ Senior Editors and Associate Editors on a review that the participants develop on a first round submission to MISQ and (2) the opportunity to discuss with editors and other participants on how to develop a virtuous review. Designed and offered Post-ICIS MISQ Reviewer Development Workshops in Dublin (2016), Seoul (2017), San Francisco (2018), and Munich (2019), and in a virtual format (2020).