How Much Is Web Traffic Changing the News You Read?

If you’ve ever thought that the quest for more clicks is affecting the sorts of articles that get published in the media, Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim wants you to know that you’re right. But it’s not quite the overarching impact that you might expect. Read More

The First Step to Successful Innovation? Choosing the Right Partners

Wharton management professor Exequiel Hernandez searches for the optimal mix of domestic and foreign partners in a firm’s network. The answer depends on what type of innovative solution a firm is trying to produce.Read More

The Effect of a Tighter Link to Customers on Product Innovation Strategy

Funded Research Proposal

One of the important consequences of recent technological advances has been that firms and customers are in much closer contact with each other. Using the web and mobile technologies, customers have the ability to send more frequently and more accurately their needs to firms. In this project, we use a simulation approach to understand some of the consequences of these developments.Read More

Renting Capabilities from Consultants in Post-Acquisition Integration

Funded Research Proposal

This research investigates capability development at the business unit level of analysis. To do so, we consider business units that have been serially bought and sold, or “repeatedly divested” units.Read More

Connecting Internal and External Networks of Cooperation: The North Star Alliance’s Roadside Wellness Centers Across Africa

Funded Research Proposal

This research project examines how organizations can develop innovative solutions to large-scale socio-economic problems in emerging markets through multi-stakeholder partnerships. The objective is to determine how these partnerships are built, what the optimal configuration of partners is, and how the partnerships should be coordinated.Read More

A randomized control trial in oral health on varying financial incentives and frequency of performance feedback for dental self-care

Funded Research Proposal

The burden of oral disease in the U.S. is high, and in need of novel approaches to improving preventive oral health behaviors. Almost half of U.S. adults have periodontal disease, while 92% of adults and 50% of children experience dental caries. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) put new emphasis on financial incentives in which financial rewards for patients and providers are linked to health decisions and outcomes.Read More

Strategic switchbacks: Dynamic commercialization strategies for technology entrepreneurs

Published Research

We present a synthetic framework in which a technology entrepreneur employs a dynamic
commercialization strategy to overcome obstacles to the adoption of their ideal strategy. Whereas prior work portrays the choice of whether to license a new technology or to self-commercialize as a single, static decision, we suggest that when entrepreneurs encounter obstacles to their ideal strategy they can nevertheless achieve it by temporarily adopting a non-ideal strategy.Read More

Neural Correlates of Post-Conventional Moral Reasoning: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study

Published Research

Going back to Kohlberg, moral development research affirms that people progress through different stages of moral reasoning as cognitive abilities mature. Individuals at a lower level of moral reasoning judge moral issues mainly based on self-interest (personal interests schema) or based on adherence to laws and rules (maintaining norms schema), whereas individuals at the post-conventional level judge moral issues based on deeper principles and shared ideals.Read More

Thriving Innovation Amidst Manufacturing Decline: The Detroit Auto Cluster and the Resilience of Local Knowledge Production

Analyzing the comprehensive 35-year patent data set associated with the Detroit auto cluster we confirm that innovation in clusters can increase in spite of a long-term decline in manufacturing activity. The “stickiness” of local knowledge is sustained by: (i) increasing technological specialization at the local level and (ii) growing connectedness to global centers of excellence.Read More

Knowledge Generation and Innovation Diffusion in the Global Automotive Industry—Change and Stability During Turbulent Times

This introduction to the April 2015 Industrial and Corporate Change special section establishes the context within which automotive firms cope with turbulence caused by globalization, new governmental regulations, and advances in electronics, communication, and drive train technologies.Read More

Institutional Change and Productivity Growth in China’s Manufacturing: The Microeconomics of Knowledge Accumulation and “Creative Restructuring”

This article investigates the microeconomics underlying the spectacular growth of productivity in China’s manufacturing sector over the period 1998–2007. Underlying the aggregate evidence of such dramatic growth, one observes a large, albeit shrinking, intra-sectoral heterogeneity coupled with an even more important process of learning and knowledge accumulation.Read More

The Patterns of Chinese Firm Growth: A Conditional Estimation Approach of the Asymmetric Exponential Power Density

This article investigates the impact of ownership type on the entire growth rate distributional mass of Chinese firms, using a conditional estimation approach of the asymmetric exponential power density that goes beyond simple location-shift analysis.Read More

Is it a car or truck?: managerial beliefs, the choice of product architecture, and the emergence of the minivan market segment

New markets segments are a common setting for studies in technology strategy. These studies generally assume that new segments already exist, or have formed following the introduction of a product innovation by an entering firm. Thus, theory on the role of established firms in the emergence of new market segments is underdeveloped.Read More

Do or die: Competitive effects and Red Queen dynamics in the product survival race

This study explores the reciprocal relationship between the nature and duration of competition, and innovation outcomes. We propose that the perpetually driven, reciprocal sequence of competitive action and reaction known as the “Red Queen” in evolutionary biology is a cardinal force behind the success of innovations.Read More

Business model configurations and performance: A qualitative comparative analysis in Formula One racing, 2005-2013

We investigate the business model configurations associated with high and low firm performance by conducting a qualitative comparative analysis of firms competing in Formula One racing. We find that configurations of two business models — one focused on selling technology to competitors, the other one on developing and trading human resources with competitors — are associated with high performance.Read More

Using an online community for vehicle design: project variety and motivations to participate

Firms increasingly seek to use online communities as sources of ideas, innovations, and designs. However, many such open innovation efforts lack sustained participation and ultimately fail. This research sought to understand motivations to participate in a firm-hosted design community and how the nature of the design task influences sustained participation.Read More

Managing systemic and disruptive innovation: lessons from the Renault Zero Emission Initiative

Some innovations are challenging to deploy because they destabilize existing technologies and value chains (systemic) as well as traditional customer preferences (disruptive). The existing literature does not provide clear guidance as to effective management methods for systemic and disruptive innovations (SDIs).Read More