Meet FRONT Associate Professor Hanna Komulainen: “In marketing, resilience is the ability to respond and adapt to significant, unplanned changes”

Hanna Komulainen, Associate Professor of Marketing, works in the FRONT theme "Resilient Organizations and Business Networks". Komulainen is a homegrown researcher at the University of Oulu, and before joining FRONT, she worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the unit of Marketing, Management and International Business at Oulu Business School.

“The world is in constant change, and completely unpredictable events and situations can arise anywhere and anytime – companies need to prepare and adapt”

Komulainen's research spans diverse topics, including business-to-business relationships and networks, service marketing, value creation, customer experience and digitalization.

“Recently, my focus has shifted towards entrepreneurship and sustainability-related themes such as sustainable innovations, sustainability transitions, responsible business, and the circular economy.”

In the FRONT programme, her research centers on how resilience emerges in organizations and value networks and how the reconfiguration of varied competences takes place in resilient organizations and business networks.

"The world is in constant change, and completely unpredictable events and situations can arise anywhere and anytime. It is very interesting to study how companies strive and are able to prepare for and recover from these changes, i.e., how they develop their resilience - in other words, their adaptability and sustainability in the current turbulent operating environment", she explains.

To define the concept of resilience from a marketing perspective, Komulainen sees that resilience describes the ability of an individual, company, or business network to survive challenging situations and maintain operational capability in changing conditions.

Resilience is the cross-cutting theme that closely relates to sustainable business, circular economy and entrepreneurship

Resilience is a strongly cross-cutting theme in Komulainen's key research topics. This includes, for example, creating an understanding of how the implementation of the circular economy can affect the sustainability of organizations and industries and how the principles of resilience can be integrated into circular economy business practices.

“Sustainable business and the circular economy are closely related to research on the resilience of organizations and networks. Both research fields aim to develop managerial understanding of how to solve complex social, economic and environmental challenges”, Komulainen explains.

Another main theme of Komulainen´s recent research relates to entrepreneurship and the circular economy.

"Here too, resilience is a very interesting concept because it can determine how companies and the entrepreneurial ecosystem can respond to various disruptions and environmental changes.”

Additionally, digitalization, digital business, and their connection to sustainable development and entrepreneurship are central research themes for Komulainen. She believes that combining the resilience perspective with these themes offers many new and interesting future research perspectives.

“For example, what factors make organizations sustainable in crises such as pandemics and what role digitalization plays in this are interesting but still open questions,” Komulainen describes.

Master thesis led to researchers´ career by chance

Komulainen says that originally her academic journey to be a researcher in her field started by chance. Towards the end of high school, she became interested in marketing studies and chose to study at the University of Oulu. After completing her master's thesis, she was encouraged to continue as a doctoral researcher in the ROTUAARI project, despite not initially planning a research career.

“However, doing research captivated me, and over the years I have had the opportunity to study many interesting things and phenomena in the diverse and wonderful world of marketing.”

Highlights of her career include receiving postdoctoral funding from the Research Council of Finland on her first try and securing a 5-year Senior Research Fellow contract in 2019, which solidified her belief in a permanent academic career.

Personal resilience and best ideas stem from interaction with other people

When asked about building personal resilience and finding new ideas, Komulainen credits one key factor: interaction with other people. She finds that the best ideas often emerge through discussion, collaboration, and bouncing ideas around.

“I am often inspired by reading interesting articles or following public discussions on current issues. However, I see that collaboration with different people is a key factor, whether it is about developing a new article, project, or some other idea”, she explains.

For bouncing back from work endeavors, Komulainen particularly enjoys relaxing in the company of family and friends and walking with her dogs.

“Going to the gym is also one of my favorite ways to relieve stress and get new energy for thinking."

Komulainen expects FRONT research programme to create new, meaningful research possibilities

Komulainen is excited about her new research team that focuses on investigating how radical shifts and crises impact inter-organizational networks, and how these entities can cope with a need for transition towards sustainability.

“I expect fruitful collaboration both with my research group and with other FRONT researchers so that together we can find new, interesting research topics and produce a wealth of high-quality publications and interesting, meaningful research results.”

Currently, the topics that interest Komulainen and her research group the most are related to entrepreneurship in the Arctic region, circular economy and resilience, value co-creation as a means to develop resilience in organizations and business networks, the structuring and orchestration of business networks to foster resilience and advancing circularity in public procurement through value co-creation. However, she wants to emphasize openness to all new ideas and research directions, which she believes will develop abundantly within multidiscplinary FRONT programme.

“I am convinced that we have a top-notch team with whom we will achieve a lot!”, she concludes.