The Mack Innovation Doctoral Association (MIDAS) is a student-run cross-departmental organization of Wharton PhD students interested in research topics related to innovation, including technology strategy, financing and organizing of innovation, entrepreneurship, and digitization. Its main activities include a seminar series for in-progress student research and the Wharton Innovation Doctoral Symposium (WINDS), a multi-disciplinary doctoral conference that takes place annually.
The MIDAS seminar series offers an informal and stimulating environment for students to propose new research ideas, discuss preliminary work, highlight new data sources, receive suggestions from peers, and circulate helpful information. Industry-academic seminars and workshops connect theory to practice and allow members to watch current innovation challenges play out.
Participation in MIDAS is primarily for Wharton doctoral and postdoctoral students. If you do not meet these criteria but would like to join, please contact the organizers below.
MIDAS is a collaboration between Wharton PhD students, the Mack Institute, and Wharton Doctoral Programs. The seminar was started by two PhD students, Andrea Contigiani (Management) and Kyle Myers (Healthcare), in the spring of 2015.
Seminar Topics
- Innovation and technology strategy
- Financing of innovation
- Organization of innovation
- Innovation and science policy
- Entrepreneurship
- Economics of digitization
Schedule
Board 2022–2023
- Jaeho Kim (President, MGMT) – kjaeho@wharton.upenn.edu
- Brittany Mallory (MGMT) – bmallory@wharton.upenn.edu
- Xinyu Ma (OIDD) – xinyuma@wharton.upenn.edu
- Aparajita Agarwal (MGMT) – aapa@wharton.upenn.edu
- Sathyanarayan Vijayakumar (MGMT) – sathyav@wharton.upenn.edu
How to Join
To sign up, please email the organizers at board-innovation-group@wharton.upenn.edu.
Members and Alumni
Members
Aparajita Agarwal
Aparajita is a fourth year doctoral student in the Management Department at Wharton with research interests at the intersection of innovation, economic development and entrepreneurship. Prior to joining Wharton, Aparajita worked in multiple consulting, strategy and product management roles in multi-national organizations in India and UK
Qingqing Chen
Qingqing is a PhD student in the Business Economics and Public Policy Department. Her research interest is international business, focusing on technology and risk spillover through international production network. Before joining Wharton, Qingqing received an MS in Economics in Peking University and worked as an intern at the IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institution). She finished her undergraduate at Peking University and graduated with a BA in Economics and a BS in Statistics.
Research Keywords:
firms’ innovation strategy; global production network; technology spillover
Jaeho Choi
Jaeho is a PhD student in Management with a specialization in Strategy. His current research interests center around the areas of organizational learning and adaptation and behavioral perspectives of strategy. He explores the topics through both computational modeling and empirical analyses. He holds a BA in Public Administration and Business Administration and a MS in Management from Yonsei University, South Korea.
Research Keywords:
organizational learning & adaptation; strategic decision-making
Jason Lee
Jason is a doctoral candidate in the Management Department at the Wharton School.
Research Keywords:
entrepreneurship; technology innovation
Jaeho Kim
Jaeho Kim is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Management Department at the Wharton School. He conducts research on strategies for fostering technological innovation by entrepreneurial individuals, firms, and ecosystems. His present work addresses startups’ innovation teams and investigates how the team composition of talents and tech-based knowledge affects the subsequent innovation performance of individual members of the team.
Xinyu Ma
Xinyu Ma is a doctoral student in the Operations, Information and Decisions Department of the Wharton School, with a concentration in information systems and technology. His research interests lie in digital transformation, technology strategy, and innovation. Xinyu is also passionate about applying natural language processing methods to large-scale text data to measure economic variables and derive business insights.
Research Keywords:
economics of innovation; digital transformation; information technology
Brittany Mallory
Brittany Mallory is a Ph.D. student in management, specializing in strategic human capital. She studies how firms navigate the external labor market to hire workers and the consequences of mobility to workers’ careers. She is especially interested in how these questions intersect with startups as they scale and change organizational size and form. Prior to beginning doctoral work, Brittany worked in marketing research and as a research assistant studying coworking spaces and human capital mobility. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Sathya Vijayakumar
Sathya is a 4th year doctoral student in the Management Department with a focus on corporate and non-market strategy. In particular, his research interests range from mergers and acquisitions in innovative contexts to how social movements impact corporate policy. Prior to beginning doctoral work, Sathya worked for 7 years on management consulting and corporate social responsibility engagements. He previously earned an MBA from the University of Michigan and a BS from the University of North Carolina.
Research Keywords:
mergers; acquisitions; activist investors; social movements
Daniel Wilde
Dan is a doctoral student at the Wharton School’s Management Department. He has a B.S. an MBA from Brigham Young University, and Master’s in Accounting from the College of William & Mary. Prior to returning to school, Dan worked as a CPA for EY and as a consultant for small distressed firms. His research interests encompass the microfoundations of how decision makers sense and shape changing industries.
Alumni
Sarath Balachandran
Jiayi Bao
Aymeric Bellon
Andrew Boysen
Logan Bryan
Andrea Contigiani
John Eklund
Charu Gupta
Jessica Jeffers
Karren Knowlton
Hideto Koizumi
Fujie Jin
Jessica Kim-Gina
Tong Liu
Bowen Lou
Mauricio Medeiros Junior
Alex Miller
Kyle R. Myers
Tanya Paul
Michael Pergler
Lindsay Relihan
Ryan Peters
Lisa Tang
Sirui Wang
Andy Wu
Hongyu Xiao