Innovation Management Research

Since 2001, the Mack Institute has provided over $4.5 million in funding toward more than 600 projects that advance our four research priorities. The result is a cross-industry body of research covering paradigm-shifting technologies and innovation strategy. We invite you to browse our archive of research below.

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Latest Research

New Paper: Increasing AI Idea Variance

Mack Institute Research Assistant Lennart Meincke, Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick and Mack Institute Co-Director and Wharton Professor Christian Terwiesch have published the next in Terwiesch’s series of working papers on ChatGPT. The new paper evaluates how LLMs can be used for idea generation and explores methods to increase the novelty, quality and dispersion of AI-generated ...Read More

Consumer Preferences and Firm Technology Choice

Published Research

Advances in technology change the way consumers search and shop for products. Emerging is the trend of home-shopping devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, which allow consumers to search or order products. We investigate how consumer brand and technology preferences may interact with the functionalities of technology-enabled shopping (TES) devices to determine the ...Read More

Can AI Provide Ethical Advice?

Christian Terwiesch, Mack Institute co-director and Wharton Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, continues his exploration of Generative AI with a new paper entitled “Can AI Provide Ethical Advice?” Co-authored with Lennart Meincke, the paper details an experiment that pits advice from the New York Times famous “The Ethicist” column against advice generated by ChatGPT. The ...Read More

Preparing Organizations for Greater Turbulence

Published Research

Vigilant organizations excel at seeing looming threats and embryonic opportunities sooner than rivals, which prepares them to act faster when needed. Four drivers distinguish vigilant from vulnerable organizations, which can be used to design a roadmap to improve organizational acuity and preparedness. Read More

Private Equity as an Intermediary in the Market for Corporate Assets

Published Research

We examine the role of non-venture private equity (PE) firms as intermediaries in the market for corporate assets. We argue that in order to create and capture value by acquiring established businesses and selling them to corporate buyers, PE firms must possess at least one of three potential advantages: they must be able to identify ...Read More

Examining Effects of Company Pages on Job Ad Effectiveness

Funded Research Proposal

In this study, we aim to quantify the impact of information provision on jobseeker attention and applications. We explore how firms may improve job ad effectiveness through obtaining and maintaining a “company page” on an online job search platform. We study the implications of these firm actions on job ad performance and for jobseekers’ search. ...Read More

Algorithmic Governance: The Case of Decentralized Exchanges on Blockchains

Funded Research Proposal

This project studies how algorithmic governance affect economic coordination in the context of blockchain-based organizations. Specifically, the project studies the algorithmic governance structures adopted among decentralized exchange protocols deployed on blockchains. The project documents and develops frameworks to understand variation in the kinds of structures adopted. In addition, the project examines how the adoption of ...Read More

Cash or Equity? Employees’ Compensation and the Gender of the Startup Founder

Funded Research Proposal

We extend recent studies on how gender shapes subordinate-supervisor interactions by documenting that employees may, under some conditions, negatively stereotype female supervisors in ways that make them more risk averse when choosing the form of compensation. we use employer-employee matched data from Sweden for the period 1991-2021 to assess whether an employee’s chosen compensation in ...Read More

Quality in the Generic Pharmaceutical Market

Funded Research Proposal

Asymmetric information about quality characterizes many important markets, including in healthcare, banking, real estate, and used goods. Without intervention, quality in these markets can easily deteriorate. Vertical intermediaries, such as distributors and retailers, may play a powerful role in disciplining quality when consumers are difficult to inform. I study the effects of informed intermediaries on ...Read More

Opportunities and Risks in Belief Distribution Elicitations

Funded Research Proposal

Researchers and practitioners have increasingly embraced the novel practice of eliciting the entire belief distributions, as it provides a more thorough understanding of stakeholders’ beliefs. My recent paper (co-authored with Professor Joe Simmons) suggests that constructing belief distributions can sometimes inadvertently exacerbate people’s overconfidence in their predictions. Read More