Capturing Economic Value from Innovation Investments

The “value chain smile” posits that firms capture the most value at the upstream (R&D/design) and downstream (marketing/customer-facing) ends of the supply chain, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We argue that this ambiguity arises because existing studies rely on globally anchored, industry-level measures of upstreamness that obscure firm-specific supply network structure. This project proposes to ...Read More

Routing mechanisms are crucial for efficiently matching specialized resources to customer needs at the lowest cost. Improving allocation to these specialized resources, then, is of first-order concern for many organizations. But when human decision-makers are tasked with allocation in a complex environment, it can be challenging to understand their decision processes and design systems that ...Read More

Entrepreneurial firms operate in environments characterized by rapid technological change, shifting demand, and heightened uncertainty. While prior research has identified factors associated with startup growth and survival, much of this work relies on static, ex post measures and offers limited insight into how firms adapt strategically in real time. This project proposes artificial intelligence as ...Read More

Many firms have identified opportunities to innovate, but can’t connect them with potential solutions within other parts of their organization. The purpose of this project is to test the hypothesized reasons why these internal opportunity markets are inefficient and evaluate possible ways to improve them. Read More

Regulators often seek to spur the adoption of green technologies (such as electric vehicles) using one of two financial subsidies: lowering the upfront cost of buying the technology (such as an electric vehicle subsidy) and lowering the marginal cost of using the technology (such as an electricity tariff subsidy). This project evaluates how the economic ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

Grid-scale electricity storage technologies play a vital role in balancing electricity supply and demand, particularly as renewable energy sources like wind and solar introduce greater variability into power systems. Lithium-ion batteries, accounting for 90% of U.S. electricity storage capacity, are widely regarded as essential to the clean energy transition. By storing excess electricity during periods ...Read More

Corporate reputation is a vital strategic asset for organizations. Yet, its socially constructed nature has made it challenging for scholars to agree on a precise definition or develop a reliable measurement strategy for it. Historically, scholars have relied on measures that are useful for assessing reputation earned but fail to capture its dynamic nature or ...Read More

Most of the prior research on the topic of commercializing academic science approaches the topic from the supply side (innovations from academic institutions and scientists). The needs and behavior of firms are rarely considered in this literature. We aim to do so by using a variety of data sources, both proprietary and public, to characterize ...Read More