impactful research ci

News You Can Use: How Staying in Touch with the World Improves Your Problem Sense

by Jerry Davis In partnership with Phanish Phurnam and the Collective Impact Salon, we are in the second year of our project to help PhD students choose a dissertation topic. We started with a familiar insight: the time after comprehensive exams can be a twilight zone of uncertainty. Doctoral training…Read More

Mapping the Murky Waters: The Promise of Integrative Experiment Design

by Abdullah Almaatouq (Guest Author) My PhD journey began with a clear vision: to unravel the interplay between social network structures and their collective outcomes. I was particularly interested in the collective intelligence arising in those structures. With several projects already underway on this topic, I felt prepared. Perhaps optimistically,…Read More

Impact, Attention & The Division of Labor

by Tim Simcoe (Guest Author) This post is in response to Olav Sorenson’s Want Your Research To Have Impact? Consider These Three Questions. In an earlier contribution to this salon, Olav Sorenson proposed that “impactful” research provides a basis for believing that a feasible action will produce meaningful change in…Read More

What is Collective Impact, Really?

by Anita McGahan To answer, “what is collective impact, really?,” first begs the question, “How do we have impact in the field of management and organizations?,” which then raises, “How does that impact emerge collectively?”   Our Collective Impact conversations got me thinking about both. So how do we have impact?  …Read More

Seize the Opportunity to Research the Collective Impact of ESG Factors

by Witold Henisz (Guest Author) For many years, despite increasing globalization of the economy and business education, doctoral students and junior scholars were advised not to study international topics or international samples. Why? Because such studies were perceived to have poor quality or suspect data and reviewers and editors were…Read More

Response To “Are Management Scholars the Best Scholars in the History of the World?”

by Gautam Ahuja I thank Myles for providing a very nice starting point for an interesting debate here. Let me present a different perspective. First, a novel theoretical contribution does not imply a complete new theory. Indeed most published papers with a theoretical contribution provide only a nuance or conditioning…Read More

Novelty is Overrated

by Connie Helfat Murray Davis’ classic 1971 article “That’s Interesting!” asserts that a theory must be interesting to be considered great. He goes on to say that all interesting theories challenge routinely held assumptions. By implication, counterintuitive theories, which by their definition deviate from common assumptions, are far more likely…Read More

Response to “From Quasi-Replication to Generalization”

by Phanish Puranam Lori and Dan's post "From Quasi-Replication to Generalization: Making 'Basis Variables' Visible" gives us a nice way to think about generalization in terms of “basis variables”.  I’d like to extend their thought with a complementary way of thinking about generalization using machine learning (ML) techniques. Generalization can…Read More

Are Management Scholars the Best Scholars in the History of the World?

by Myles Shaver I ask this question because the requirement or norm of many of our high-quality journals that all papers must advance a novel theoretical contribution implies the answer is yes. This requirement or norm means the first test of a theory (in the case of an empirical paper…Read More

From Quasi-Replication to Generalization: Making “Basis Variables” Visible

by Lori Rosenkopf and Dan Levinthal  A persistent challenge in social science research is understanding whether and when empirical results generalize beyond a specific study’s sample or context. In 2016, Rich Bettis, Connie Helfat and Myles Shaver produced a special issue of Strategic Management Journal containing several “quasi-replications” which examined…Read More