Jonas Stark Presents His Study on Partner Selection of Organisations in Crises at EGOS Colloquium 2026
From 9 to 11 July 2026, the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) held its 42nd Colloquium. The University of Bergamo ran the event in a mainly online format that brought researchers together worldwide without travel. Under the general theme “Reframing Organizations in the More-than-Human Society”, scholars in organization studies met to exchange their work. Jonas Stark, Research Fellow at the Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin (LEIZ) presented the second paper of his dissertation.
Jonas Stark analyzed how organizations adapt their partner selection during crises, meaning the way they choose the firms they collaborate with. He examined collaborative patent applications filed during the Covid-19 pandemic and the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.
The results showed that firms change their partner selection strategies in times of crisis. These strategic responses varied by industry and by crisis. No single pattern applied to every organization in the data.
Stark presented his paper in the session “Network Agency, Creativity, and Innovation: The Mutual Interdependence between Network Actors and Social Structures”. Stefan Breet (Radboud University), Francesca Pallotti (University of Exeter), Stefano Tasselli (University of Exeter) and Leon Oerlemans (Tilburg University) convened the session.