Guest editorial: Globalization and the convergence of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship

This Special Issue of the Management Research Review comprises a selection of the best papers presented at the 2014 annual conference of the International Management Research Academy (IMRA) co-organized with the Global Business School at the Kean University Union campus in New Jersey, USA. The theme of the conference centered on “Globalization and the convergence of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship”, with the aim of bringing together a diverse and multi-disciplinary group of scholars and practitioners from across emerged, emerging and frontier markets. The conference received 108 extended abstracts involving 239 authors from 31 countries, of which 31 proposals were rejected in the first round, leaving a total of 76 submissions to be invited for presentation. The conference attracted a number of leading academics and practitioners, including the keynote addresses by Dr. Raj Shaj, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Telemed Ventures; Joseph Sheridan, President and Chief Operating Officer of Wakefern Food Corporation; Dr. Dawood Farahi, President of Kean University; and Dr. Michael Cooper, Dean of the Global Business School at Kean University. While the keynote speakers uniformly highlighted the need for forward-looking and entrepreneurial leaders with global and multicultural perspectives, the selected conference presentations provided valuable examples and demonstrated ways in which the convergence of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship could offer significant competitive advantage to any business in our increasingly globalized environment.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Un-nation branding: the cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in Israeli soft power

This chapter presents a theory of ‘un-nation branding’. We define this as the practice of promoting a nation-state with minimal or even no reference to the nation-state. In contrast to nation branding, un-nation branding involves states symbolising themselves as/through cities (or regions) in order to make themselves attractive to others. In articulating this theory, we focus on the case study of Israel’s ‘Two Cities. One Break’ advertising campaign. We highlight how this campaign serves to visually represent Israel as the cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. As a practice of un-nation branding, we argue that the ‘Two Cities. One Break’ campaign silences contentious aspects of the Israeli state, such as questions about borders, settlements and conflict. As such, this campaign is demonstrative of the importance of un-nation branding for states in the twenty-first century, and we suggest several implications of un-nation branding as well as future directions for research into the role of cities in contemporary accounts of soft power