Nicolai and I have been friends for three decades, especially through their collaboration at the Copenhagen Business School’s DRUID initiative, which has become one of the most exciting and important innovation conferences in the world, and which this year will be held in Toronto.

Against the backdrop of this friendship, we have sometimes held different perspectives on issues such as the implications of climate change for our field.   This topic was the subject of a debate in which we were involved both in writing and online.  

My article, with our friends Tima Bansal, Rudy Durand, Markus Kreutzer, Sven Kunisch, is entitled “Strategy can no longer ignore planetary boundaries:  A call for tackling strategy’s ecological fallacy.”  Nicolai’s article with our mutual friend and co-author, Peter Klein, Says “No.”   “Do we need a new strategy paradigm?  No.”

I began by asking Nicolai what he sees as areas of agreement and disagreement.

Nicolai saw our debate as primarily about whether the field of Strategic Management has the right tools to address climate issues.  But putting this aside, there’s a lot on which we agree.   For example, both of us agree that there has been an explosion of wealth over the past 150-180 years driven by a system of fossil-fuel exploitation.   Nicolai demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the facts in mentioning that fossil fuels now account for about 80% of energy production and are forecast to account for 56% over the next 30 years or so.    He quoted President Obama in saying that all available sources of energy are going to be relevant over the coming years.

Nicolai also cited a few ideas that I later identified as areas of potential disagreement.  For example, Nicolai said that “economic growth is really good, and we need more of it.”   He cited Hannah Ritchie’s analysis showing that deprivation of access to energy leads to political unrest.

I argued that economic growth has been accompanied by the concentration of wealth in the hands of relative few people rather than widespread prosperity.  I said that the extraction of non-renewable fossil fuels from the planet was making the rich much richer without making the vast majority of people better off.   The epidemic of despair, opioids, mental-health challenges, violence, and dissociation among especially the middle class and impoverished in country after country – including in relatively wealthy countries such as the United States – is the product of the fossil-fuel-fired system of wealth creation that has led to the climate emergency.  So whether we need more economic growth of this type is a matter of disagreement between us.

Nicolai then turned to the question of whether the State should intervene in markets in efforts to manage problems such as the ones that I had described.

He first cited the UK, where the poor are suffering in part because of a tripling of energy costs over the past few years.  He described how policies in France requiring that apartments meet minimum standards of energy efficiency as a condition for their sale had effectively made many apartments unsellable.    The Yellow Vest movement, for example, was about failed public policy.   Nicolai’s main concern is that the alternative to the market – which he conceives as State intervention – is much more problematic.

We then turned to areas where we agree.

Nicolai cited Anita’s paper with Peter Klein, our common co-author, as an important contribution to research on governance.   He described how we need deeper understanding of how governance rules can be adapted to address contingencies of importance, including issues around energy security.   We talked about various forms of governance – such as the State, Civil Society and the Private Sector – that are interacting in complicated ways for which we need greater understanding.   

Nicolai described the strong influence of Mazzucato as problematic in part because many States do not have the capacity to act in effective ways.  He cited major blunders as in Germany phasing out nuclear; and Denmark cutting carbon emissions by 70% by 2030.   While I agreed that we need to make good decisions to build State capacity, and to execute on it effectively, I also saw as an area of potential disagreement that there can be an important role for the State particularly where its mandate – its design for transparency and accountability – can advance social goals.   

Nicolai then turned to the blunders of the “entrepreneurial state” in picking and promoting innovations.  Again, while I hesitated to concede that states are uniformly bad at promoting innovation, I did agree that we need deeper understanding of when and how states can be effective at delivering on innovation.

In the end, Nicolai and I agree on three important areas of research opportunity to illuminate sources of our disagreements and, most importantly, to advance the agenda on climate and other social problems.   These are, first, a better understanding of the history of climate change; second, analysis of comparative governance arrangements, and of interaction between governance models; and third, deeper knowledge about the ways in which companies and states interact as innovators in the public interest.   Perhaps more than anything, what we need is to continue talking so that we develop and deepen as scholars who share a commitment to the public good.