Johan Roos

Biography

Dr. Johan Roos is Dean and Managing Director of Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), where he also holds a professorship in strategy. He has two decades of work experience abroad as an internationally recognized scholar, and adviser in the field of strategy, innovation, and change.
From 2009 to March 2011 he served as the President of Copenhagen Business School. Prior to his engagement at CBS, he held the endowed Bo Rydin and SCA Professor chair in strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics 2007-2009.

He was also academically responsible for the school´s EMBA and MBA Programs, which were offered in  Stockholm, St. Petersburg and Riga. From 2000 to 2006 he served as Managing Director of Imagination Lab Foundation, a non-profit Swiss research foundation dedicated to cross disciplinary research pursued by team of scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, music and management science. During his leadership the Lab secured more than CHF 13 millions in donations from large corporations and engaged with more than 1.500 executives in many countries.  In 2006 Dr. Roos established the annual Imagination Lab Award for Innovative Scholarship in collaboration with European Academy of Management (EURAM) and chaired the selection committee during the first three years. He remains on the Board of Imagination Lab Foundation.

From 1995-2000 Dr. Roos was a Professor of Strategy and General Management at IMD in Lausanne, where he designed, directed and contributed to a range of executive programs for large companies. From 1990-1994 he was a faculty member at Norwegian School of Management (BI) in Oslo where he taught strategic management. In parallel, he held a Fellow position at the Norwegian Institute for Marketing, a non-profit research foundation affiliated with BI, focusing on customer satisfaction research.

1988-1989 he was a researcher at the William H. Wurster Center for Multinational Management Studies at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania where he studied strategic alliances and strategy processes of multinational firms headquartered in Japan, US and Europe. Dr. Roos has been a Visiting Professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he has given PhD courses during several academic years as well as at its sister university Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH).
 

Research

Over the last two decades his research, teaching and consulting has focused on strategic and leadership processes in alliance formation, knowledge management and in strategy making. He is the author or co-author of some 80 articles, book chapters and books as well as of some 65 case studies, unpublished papers and articles for practitioners.  His latest books are Everyday Strategic Preparedness (2007) and Thinking from Within (2006), both published by Palgrave McMillan and his two latest articles were published in Journal of Business Ethics (2010) and Journal of Change Management (2009). To date his many publications have obtained some 6.000 citations in Google Scholar.

Dr Roos is a member of the key professional organizations in the management studies field and he serves as a peer-reviewer for premier scholarly journals in the management and organizational studies field. He has worked as an adviser and consultant for a wide range of industries on five continents,  including newspapers, new media, cable TV, enterprise storage, telecommunications, banking, insurance, information systems, consumer packaging, distribution of consumer electronics, toys, pharmaceuticals, earth moving machinery, automotives, house construction, fine chemicals, transportation machinery, agro business, power generation, re-insurance, yellow pages, and telecom. He regularly assists organizations in innovating strategy processes and leadership development.

Dr. Roos has started several companies, served on the investment committee of a venture fund and co-invented the patented LEGO Serious Play™ tool used by management consultants worldwide (more on this). He has also board experience from small and listed organizations in several countries and is an adviser to on on five continents. Dr. Roos enjoys the space in-between technology, design and business. For example, he served as the chairman of the Danish Government´s international Design Vision 2020 Committee and he is an elected member of the Danish Academy of the Technical Sciences (ATV).