Broad launches internal speaker series to strengthen research culture and cross-college collaboration

The Eli Broad College of Business has launched a new Broad Internal Speaker Series aimed at fostering collaboration, sparking interdisciplinary dialogue and strengthening the college’s research culture across departments.

The series, which is open exclusively to Broad faculty and academic staff, creates a regular forum for Broad researchers to share their work in an accessible way and exchange ideas across disciplines.

“Our goal is to create a shared intellectual space where faculty can learn from one another, stretch their thinking and identify new opportunities to work together,” said John Hollenbeck, associate dean of research & doctoral programs and Eli Broad University Professor of Business. “Great research doesn’t happen in silos. This series is about building relationships across departments and creating the conditions for ideas to intersect in ways that lead to new questions, new methods and new collaborations.”

The inaugural session featured Brian Pentland, Main Street Capital Corporation Intellectual Capital Professor in the Department of Accounting and Information Systems, who recently was named a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for his work on organizational dynamics. While Pentland’s talk highlighted his own research, he emphasized that the broader purpose of the series is collective.

“This is not about me, it’s about us,” Pentland told attendees. “It’s about showing up, talking to each other and getting to know each other.”

Pentland’s presentation, Weaving the Fabric of Organizing: An Invitation to Temporal Fabric Theory, introduced a process-centric way of thinking about organizations that places timing and interaction at the center of how work unfolds. Drawing on more than 30 years of research into routine dynamics, he described how “path nets”, the intersections of individual and organizational trajectories, create opportunities for action, learning and change.

Pentland argued that processes generate organizations, not the other way around. He outlined how new computational tools and temporal modeling approaches could make these ideas more analytically tractable and open the door to interdisciplinary applications, from health care delivery and entrepreneurship to career development and organizational design.

“Comings and goings set the stage for doings and sayings,” Pentland said, illustrating how progress depends on paths intersecting. Using a hospital setting as an example, he showed how the paths of patients, doctors and nurses must connect to move forward. If a patient doesn’t cross paths with a doctor, they can’t progress through their patient journey.

The content of the talk reflected the broader intent behind the series: to make research accessible to faculty across disciplines and to highlight how new knowledge can be translated into classrooms, textbooks and executive education.
“This series is meant to draw in an audience beyond any single department,” Hollenbeck said. “When faculty from different areas hear each other’s work and start asking questions together, that’s where real innovation begins.”

The Broad Internal Speaker Series will continue throughout the year, featuring faculty from across the college who are asked to present their work in a way that resonates with a general academic audience. By centering process, collaboration and shared inquiry, the series represents a strategic investment in Broad’s long-term research mission.

As Pentland noted, the core idea behind path nets is universal: intersecting paths create opportunity. With this new series, Broad is intentionally creating more of those intersections and more opportunities for research to flourish across the college.