Topic 1: Purified by Pressure: How Local Resistance Forges Radical Novelty

What if an innovation-averse, heritage-defending setting does more than merely obstruct novelty? What if it provides a harsh yet productive selection environment where only the most radical ideas break through? By examining the confrontational rise of deconstructivist architecture, we trace how rejection by the entrenched field drove the purification of a novel style. Resistance did not stop innovation; rather, it forged it into radical form.

About the speaker:

Gernot Grabher is Professor of Urban and Regional Economics at the HCU Hamburg. Before joining HCU, he held academic positions at the Universities of Konstanz and Bonn, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, and King’s College London. He has also been a visiting fellow at Columbia and Cornell Universities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Santa Fe Institute, Copenhagen Business School, and Zhejiang University. He served as co-editor of Economic Geography, Regions and Cities, and Perspectives in Metropolitan Research. His research has been published in leading journals across organizational studies and economic geography, including Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organization Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations as well as Environment and Planning, Geoforum, Journal of Economic Geography, and Regional Studies.

Topic 2: Every Edge is at an In-Between: On Institutional Entrepreneurship and Innovation

All organisations hold immanent, creative forces from which its heterotopic others can emerge. There are silences and left-overs from dominant normalities that can be tactically explored to potentialize creative becomings. We will explore how the entrepreneurial resides in both processes, using data from a study of institutional entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial leadership in the M+ case.

About the speaker:

Dr. Daniel Hjorth is the Ulf G. Lindén Professor of Aesthetics and Business Creativity at Lund University School of Economics and Management, Sweden, and Prof. of Entrepreneurship and Organization at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and Adjunct Prof. at Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, Japan. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies (Financial Times top 50 listed) and the Founding Director of the Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity (ABC) at Lund University.

📅 Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2025

🕑 Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm

📍 Venue: Social Sciences Chamber, 11/F., The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus The University of Hong Kong

🗣️ Language: English

🔗 Register here: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104241