Innovation Opportunities and Risks

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, ...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

Prior authorization (PA) is widely used to manage utilization of high-cost health services, yet it imposes administrative burdens and can delay care. As generative AI is increasingly deployed to automate both the submission of prior authorization requests by providers and authorization decisions by insurers, raising questions about the effectiveness of gatekeeping as a utilization management ...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

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 high-growth ventures. This project explores how ...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

Consumers are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) as an aid to everyday writing (i.e., email, text). While it is clear that LLMs can enhance the grammatical and syntactical structure of written communication, might they also lead people to communicate things that depart from their original intentions? We explored this question through an experimental ...Read More

Prescription drug spending has increased rapidly over the last two decades. Prior authorization represents an innovative strategy in Medicaid’s prescription drug benefit management, using administrative tools to influence prescribing behaviors and control expenses. State Medicaid programs have widely adopted prior authorization policies to curb spending and enhance the targeting of treatments. Despite the importance of ...Read More

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 ...Read More

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into daily life, understanding how humans and machines achieve mutual understanding has become a crucial scientific challenge. Our research addresses this challenge by developing a digital web platform that studies how humans and AI systems communicate and build shared understanding in real-time. While machines can now model our preferences ...Read More