The 31st EIBA Annual Conference
Oslo, Norway - December 10-13, 2005

The conference
The general theme of the 2005 EIBA conference was “Landscapes and Mindscapes in a Globalized world”, which pointed to the wide-ranging and ever evolving domain of International Business. The theme provoked quite a lot of interest among IB scholars and many actually submitted papers that picked on the theme, some even giving it a new twist: e.g. a paper launched the term “Seascapes” (alongside landscapes and mindscapes) in a paper about the maritime sector!

The conference was held at BI Norwegian School of Management, and was organized in a ½-1-½ day structure, like in Copenhagen 2003. The conference was preceded both by the EIBA Doctoral Tutorial on December 10-11, and by two Nord-IB activities (the Nord-IB is a Nordic Doctoral School in International Business) on December 9-11. The latter were integrated into the EIBA conference scheduling as pre-conference activities, which represents a novelty in the context of EIBA conferences.

The conference featured three plenary sessions, which were all held according to plan. The opening keynote session on Sunday, December 11, was on the theme of “Research Programs in International Business” and featured Witold J. Henisz, Jean- François Hennart and Anand Swaminathan as keynote speakers. Henrich R. Greve had a key role in organizing it. On Monday, December 12, the three finalists for the Gunnar Hedlund Award presented their doctoral work that earned them the nomination to this prestigious prize. Renata Kosova won the award. The closing session of the conference was held on Tuesday, December 13, when John Dunning chaired the EIBA Fellows panel, in which John Cantwell, Jan Fagerberg, John Hagedoorn, Knut Haanæs, and Franscesca Sanna-Randaccio presented their views on ”The Internationalisation of R&D - Implications for Countries and Firms”.

A total of 192 papers were presented in 26 competitive paper sessions and 25 workshop paper sessions across 10 different tracks. 31 papers were accepted for the poster session. In addition, eleven panels were also accepted for the conference.

The review process for conference papers was much facilitated by the electronic systems for reviewer-signups and paper submissions. The call for reviewers was highly successful with more than 250 colleagues around the world signing up as reviewers. The overwhelming majority of paper submissions were made electronically. A few were handled outside the system, mainly due to problems with their uploading into the system.

Participants
There were 345 registered participants (not including the local organizing committee and the invited key note speakers), of which 104 were students. Eight publishers had exhibitions at the conference. Europeans dominated with 80% of the participants, but the share of participants from non-European countries has increased somewhat: up from 15% in 2004 to 20% in 2005. The geographical distribution of participants is shown in Table 1. The largest contingents came from the United Kingdom with 44 participants, Finland with 42 participants, and Norway with 41 participants. Compared to the 2004 conference two elements in particular stand out: (i) there are almost twice as many participants from the USA in 2005; and (ii) there were only half as many participants from East and Central European countries.

Table 1. Distribution of participants according to country

Country	# participants
Australia	15
Austria	9
Belgium	7
Brazil	4
Canada	7
China	1
Czech Republic	1
Denmark	14
Estonia	3
Fiji	2
Finland	42
France	4
Germany	15
Greece	5
India	1
Ireland	4
Israel	4
Italy	18
Japan	2
Lithuania	2
Netherlands	11
New Zealand	4
Nigeria	11
Norway	41
Poland	2
Portugal	7
Russian Federation	1
Singapore	1
Slovenia	4
Spain	10
Sweden	19
Switzerland	7
United Kingdom	44
United States of America	23
In all	345

Academic epilogue
As a result of the agreement between EIBA and Elsevier/North-Holland, the new serial Progress in International Business Research will be published, preferably annually, as a selection of papers presented at the EIBA conferences. The first volume, which is currently being edited by Gabriel R.G. Benito and Henrich R. Greve, will comprise nine articles (the three key note essays and six regular articles). The process has been highly selective and based on peer review. The volume is scheduled to be available in time for the coming EIBA conference in Fribourg, December 2006.

Gabriel Benito