Event-Based Strategizing: Conferences as a Genre for Platform Ecosystem Development

In high-technology industries, an increasing number of firms communicate with audiences by periodically designing and organising conferences to coordinate participants, explain strategic direction, and clarify strategic meaning. Existing strategy-as-practice research focuses on discourse, visuals, materiality, and space, but we know little about the mechanisms through which organisations coordinate multiple modalities simultaneously within a single recognisable genre. Therefore, this thesis treats conferences as an event-based genre of strategizing to fill this gap. In conferences, firms bundle and sequence multimodal resources through careful design and arrangement, providing participants with immersive experiences in order to clarify strategic meaning and achieve mobilization.
This thesis aims to understand how conferences function as an event-based strategic genre by answering the following research question: How and why do firms use conferences as an event-based genre for inter-organisational strategizing? Specifically, I take the strategy practice of a platform sponsor in a nascent ecosystem as the research context in order to understand the role of conferences. This study adopts an in-depth, inductive, longitudinal single-case design and examines a series of conferences staged by Huawei during the development of the HarmonyOS ecosystem. The empirical study integrates multiple data sources, including conference videos, observations, and archival data. Through inductive analysis, I identify four core modalities in conferences, including keynote speeches, visual presentations, demonstration materials, and organisational space, which further explain how these modalities are bundled and sequenced to produce a strategic effect beyond organisational boundaries.
The analysis develops an integrative theoretical model. The model identifies three interrelated forms of strategy work in conference-based strategy practice, including actualization (making the ecosystem visible and credible), fraternization (forging collective identity and collaboration), and mobilization (prompting commitment and action). These three interlinked forms of strategy work address complementary layers of participants’ uncertainty and collectively support ongoing ecosystem participation and legitimacy.