Brexit as a transformational change event raises significant challenges for the global economy. Ireland is particularly susceptible to Brexit with critical industrial sectors such as agri-food facing significant threats.

Reflecting on Brexit and other systemic events such as the US Presidential Election, the 2017 Irish Academy of Management Conference will examine how business and management research can contribute insights to help businesses, managers and policy makers respond. We invite papers that explore pertinent areas such as marketing, innovation and change management however, also welcome papers from the wide spectrum of business and management disciplines or papers which study diverse industry sectors that may be particularly susceptible to global change events.

As a community of business and management scholars, we need to be prominent in responding to contemporary systemic events. In light of the conference theme there is an opportunity for contributions to reflect more broadly on how business and management research can help respond to contemporary global challenges, such as Brexit, in a way that links theory to practice. With the increasing importance of ‘impact’ as a measure of academic research in Business Schools we therefore welcome papers that show how research has helped to improve, for example, the competitive position of firms and/or industrial sectors or has helped shape policy decisions.