Strategies for Innovating Archives

Entrepreneurial Spawning Across Generations: How Organizational Experience Shapes First-Generation and Second-Generation Immigrant Entrepreneurship

This project studies how prior work experience shapes who becomes an entrepreneur, when they found companies, and how successful those ventures become. Focusing on first-generation immigrants, second-generation immigrants, and native-born workers in the US, the study compares careers that begin in large technology firms with those that start in early-stage startups. Using employment histories from Revelio Labs data linked with founding outcomes from Pitchbook & Crunchbase, the project sheds light on how different organizational pathways influence entrepreneurial activity and success across immigrant generations.…Read More

Learning to Learn: Algorithmic Design for Effective Education

Xufei Liu, PhD Candidate in Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School; Gad Allon, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School; Ken Moon, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: Long-term memory is key to deeper learning, yet students differ drastically in how they acquire and retain knowledge. Current…Read More

Perceptions of Fairness in Algorithmic Decision-Making

In algorithmic decision-making, it is often mathematically impossible to satisfy competing definitions of fairness simultaneously. This impossibility makes assessing stakeholders’ fairness preferences a challenging but crucial exercise. To address this, the researchers developed an interactive tool to elicit fairness preferences by projecting the complex decision space into a simple one-dimensional choice: setting risk thresholds. This design allows participants to directly manipulate algorithm parameters and visualize the resulting tradeoffs between competing fairness metrics. Participants’ decisions enable the researchers to study (1) what Pareto-optimal settings are perceived as fair and (2) whether the design of the elicitation process itself can fundamentally shape how fairness is perceived.…Read More

Cybersecurity and Gray Hat Hacking

The advance of AI is rapidly increasing cybersecurity vulnerabilties and the risks that organizations face. While working with non-exploiting hackers is recognized as key to strengthening cybersecurity, we still lack a clear understanding of the challenges and dynamics that impact whether such partnerships succeed or breakdown. In this project we aim to identify when, why, and how the collaborations between companies and non-exploiting hackers succeed or fail.…Read More

Human Capital in Startups

I am interested in understanding how high-growth, knowledge-based startups acquire human capital against the backdrop of the challenges and dilemmas that come with rapid organizational expansion. Human capital is a critical resource for these firms, allowing for increased production, knowledge, and resources. However, the dynamic nature of high-growth periods also poses significant challenges. Against the backdrop of a growing firm’s temporal change, these firms face dilemmas in who and when to hire. Thus, I am interested in how growing startups attract, motivate, and retain human capital.…Read More

Is It Better to Pursue Goals in Sequence or in Parallel?

Sophia Pink, PhD Candidate, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School; Jose Cervantez, PhD Candidate, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School; Katy Milkman, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: When people want to build multiple habits, is it better to start them all at once or to…Read More

Leadership Composition and Personal Narrative Framing in Female-Focused Ventures: A Hiring Experiment

Tiantian Yang, Management, The Wharton School Abstract: Female-led ventures in female-focused industries (e.g., FemTech) face a unique tension between authenticity and perceived legitimacy in the eyes of potential employees. While identity-based lived experience can signal market insight and mission alignment, it may also conflict with gendered norms about who leads…Read More

The Impact of Private Equity Ownership on Medical Technologies

Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare is growing rapidly. Because medical-technology firms shape healthcare innovation, spending, and quality—and rely heavily on public insurance reimbursements—PE ownership in this sector could have substantial long-term implications for innovation, costs, and patient outcomes. Yet most existing research on PE in health care focuses on care delivery, despite 63% of PE healthcare investments involving medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. Our study will provide, to our knowledge, the first causal evidence on how PE ownership affects innovation, pricing, financial performance, and product safety among medical-technology firms.…Read More

Outlier Neglect: A Decision-Making Bias with Implications for Hiring, Investment, and Consumer Choices

We propose and test a novel decision-making bias called “outlier neglect.” In general, when evaluating people, places, and opportunities with many features, people focus on the average of those features. For example, when hiring a team, people want the average performance of the team to be high, so they try to hire individuals who perform well on average. But in many cases, the relevant metric is not the average, but the best – for example, when a pharmaceutical company tests different types of malaria drugs, their success depends on the best-performing drug (not the average) because they can scale up the best and ignore lesser performers. We propose that evaluators neglect the importance of outliers in such cases and instead focus on portfolio averages. In some cases, this leads to suboptimal outcomes (e.g. in the drug scenario above, or it may be better to hire someone to join a team who is amazing at one specialized task than someone who is higher on average). We test this bias and show that across many contexts – including personnel selection, creative idea generation, consumer decisions, and investment strategy – people neglect outliers in favor of the average, leading to suboptimal decisions.…Read More

Business Model Innovation for Renewables

Consumers who want access to renewable energy have two main options: install renewable energy generation equipment “behind” the electrical meter (e.g., solar panels on the roof) or buy energy from a utility company, which would then source energy from generation companies. The first approach has obvious diseconomies of scale. It is only available to homeowners, while the second approach requires over-reliance on utility companies, which may not contract with renewable suppliers or may offer an expensive mix of renewable and nonrenewable energy. We study an alternative innovative business model, “community solar,” whereby consumers subscribe to own a portion of the energy generated by a large solar plant. We partner with Origo Energy, a Brazilian company that pioneered this model in South America, and we analyze the behavior of consumers who switch from the traditional business model to Origo’s subscription to understand boundary conditions for community solar.…Read More

Scientific Malpractice in Alzheimer’s Research: Systematic Evidence and Impacts on Pharmaceutical Firms

Science forms the bedrock of industrial innovation, and yet the integrity of the scientific enterprise has recently been questioned across multiple fields by high-profile scandals and replication crises. How common is scientific malpractice, and what are its costs for firms that rely on scientific research to guide their innovation investments? Using advanced AI and manual validation, we estimate the prevalence and different types of data malpractice in Alzheimer’s research, both within and across papers, from 1980 to 2020. We focus on inappropriate image duplications, an objectively observed form of data malpractice widespread in a field where experimental data are often presented as figures. Preliminary findings suggest that, on average, 1.7% of all peer-reviewed papers present inappropriately duplicated images, a number that has steadily increased over time. The incidence is greater for research done in universities (relative to corporate and clinical settings), employing animal and molecular methods (relative to human subject methods), and originating from China. Our current work investigates the costs of scientific malpractice for pharmaceutical firms that base their investments on publicly available science. By tracking citations from firm patents to papers with duplicated images, we plan to estimate how much attention and resources are distorted away from findings with clinical applications and how much this may contribute to explaining the slow progress in finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.…Read More

Strategic Openness of the Innovation Portfolio

We investigate the strategic openness of firms’ innovation portfolios, focusing on the determinants and implications of disclosure strategies for diverse innovation assets, particularly in the context of artificial intelligence (AI). While firms traditionally protect innovation through patents and secrecy, open innovation frameworks have gained prominence as firms increasingly leverage external sources of innovation. This research seeks to bridge the gap between the innovation and open-source literatures by exploring how firms disclose and utilize various innovation assets—such as patents, academic publications, and open-source code—in response to their R&D strategies, market environments, and policy pressures.…Read More

Inorganic Scaling Strategies of Adolescent Technology Ventures

This study will explore technology-oriented startups (such as deeptech) scale through inorganic modes such as ecosystem partnerships and alliances. We attempt to understand how different antecedents such as founding and scaling characteristics affect the timing of when startups engage in such modes.…Read More

Electric Vehicle (EV) Fleet and Charging Infrastructure: Decision-Making by Drivers in the Gig Economy

The rapid integration of electric vehicles (EVs) into gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft presents unique challenges, particularly in driver decision-making, earnings, and operational efficiency. This study explores how EV-specific constraints, such as charging infrastructure and fleet size, influence the behavior of gig economy drivers. We analyze the role of algorithms in shaping driver earnings, pricing, and trip allocations, addressing concerns about transparency, bias, and geographic disparities. Using a proprietary dataset combined with public data on charging station locations, our research employs descriptive analysis, regression models, and simulation to examine the impact of charging accessibility on driver efficiency and service levels. The findings aim to inform algorithmic design improvements and policy interventions, fostering more equitable and efficient EV integration in gig platforms.…Read More

Exploring the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Turbocharging Innovation in the Generative AI Era

rtificial intelligence (AI) has become a transformative force in fostering innovation and productivity. In our prior research (Wu et al. 2020; Wu et al. 2019), we demonstrated that AI-driven analytics can significantly enhance innovation by combining existing technologies in novel ways and refining existing technologies. With the advent of generative AI and other advanced algorithms, firms are discovering unprecedented opportunities to innovate and create new products. Yet some firms are vastly successful at using AI to innovate while the majority fails.…Read More

How Posting on Social Media Impacts Goal Persistence

Companies often encourage their customers to share their progress toward personal goals, such as their fitness journey, on social media. In this research, we investigate how doing so impacts motivation. While documenting goal pursuit online may increase motivation through immediate social rewards (likes, comments), accountability, and social support, it could also have no effect of even backfire—especially if people focus on social media engagement rather than the underlying goal, or become discouraged by lower-than-expected feedback. We test these possibilities through a preregistered field experiment (N = 500) in which participants are assigned to either document their goal progress by posting on Instagram or by completing a private survey. Over a three-month period, we measure their gym attendance and social media engagement. The findings of this paper would provide theoretical insight into how social media interacts with goal pursuit and potentially offer practical implications for designing scalable, low-cost interventions to promote goal achievement.…Read More

Private Equity, Corporate Acquirers, and Product Innovation in Technology Acquisitions

Private equity has become an increasingly active player in technology acquisitions in recent years, yet most prior scholarship has focused on the effects of corporate acquirer ownership on performance and innovation outcomes. As a result, research provides little guidance on how firms should choose between the two acquirer types. To remedy this gap, I construct a panel data set of acquisitions in the chemical, biopharmaceutical, and medical device industries between 1990 and 2019, tracked yearly through 2022. Then, I examine how private equity and corporate acquirers differentially affect product innovation at acquired technology targets using USPTO trademark, FDA orange book, and hand-collected new product introduction data. Our results illuminate the opportunities and tradeoffs facing managers at technology companies in choosing between private equity and corporate acquirers.…Read More

Checking Current Status More Frequently Decreases Satisfaction

From the time remaining for an Uber’s arrival to the number of likes on an Instagram post, new technologies have made it easier to check the status of desired outcomes than ever before. Smartphones and other devices enable consumers to receive updates, such as a delivery driver’s status, in real-time. But is such frequent checking always beneficial? This research explores a potential downside to checking the status of desired outcomes more…Read More

Platform Bundling and Competition in the Video Streaming Market

This project investigates the welfare impact of bundling between platforms affects in the video streaming market. Platform bundling has become increasingly common in recent years. For example, comcast offers an ad-supported bundle of Netflix, Apple TV, and Peacock for just $10 per month. Similarly, a bundle of Hulu, Disney Plus, and Max allows consumers to subscribe all three with a nearly 40% discount. However, the effects of such bundling on consumers remain unclear. Existing literature shows that when competing firms offer mixed bundles of their own products, bundling enables more efficient price discrimination, which harms consumers; but also intensifies competition, which benefits consumers. The streaming market presents a unique and intriguing case because these bundles often include platforms with distinct ownership. This separate ownership of bundling platforms creates potential inefficiencies, as platforms may “freeride” own their bundling partners’ content investments while reducing their own. In this project, I will develop a structural model and apply data-driven methods to quantify the impact of mixed bundling between independently owned platforms on competition and consumer welfare.…Read More

Search Strategies in Artificial Intelligence Innovation: Balancing Competition and Commercialization

This study explores how firms’ search strategies shape innovation outcomes in the context of emerging general-purpose technologies (GPTs), with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI). GPTs, defined by their broad applicability and undefined market needs, challenge traditional search theories by requiring firms to balance advancing technological capabilities (supply-side innovation) with identifying practical use cases (demand-side innovation).…Read More