Strategies for Innovating

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 layer them on gradually? This project ...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

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

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 ...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

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

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 ...Read More

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

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 ...Read More

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, ...Read More