Mack’s Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich in the Wall Street Journal: “M.B.A. Students vs. ChatGPT”

Mack Institute co-director Christian Terwiesch and core team member Karl Ulrich have published an article in the Wall Street Journal detailing their research on on ChatGPT and idea generation. Based on a recent working paper, the article details their recent research, which compared business ideas generated by ChatGPT with ideasRead More

New Working Paper Finds ChatGPT A Better Innovation “Ideator” Than MBA Students

Earlier this year, Christian Terwiesch, Mack Institute co-director and Wharton Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, made headlines with his white paper showing that ChatGPT could easily pass a typical Wharton MBA exam. Now he and co-authors Karan Girotra, Lennart Meincke, and Karl T. Ulrich have released a new workingRead More

Alpha Assets: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage Through Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

This proposal is to fund a first study as part of a longer-term initiative to better understand the threat of disruption from technological innovation. Disruption as a term has come to be used so frequently that it has lost specific meaning. In the larger project, I aim to bring precision to the term and focus on two specific questions. Read More

Idea Generation and the Role of Feedback: Evidence from Field Experiments with Innovation Tournaments

Published Research

In many innovation settings, ideas are generated over time and managers face a decision about if and how to provide in-process feedback to the idea generators about the quality of submissions. In this article, we use design contests allowing repeated entry to examine the effect of in-process feedback on idea generation.Read More

The Importance of the Raw Idea in Innovation: Testing the Sow’s Ear Hypothesis

Published Research

How important is the original conception of an idea—the “raw” idea— to an innovation’s success? In this article, the authors explore whether raw ideas judged as “better” fare better in the market and also determine the strength of that relationship.Read More

Opportunity Spaces in Innovation: Empirical Analysis of Large Samples of Ideas

Published Research

A common approach to innovation, parallel search, is to identify a large number of opportunities and then to select a subset for further development, with just a few coming to fruition. One potential weakness with parallel search is that it permits repetition. The same, or a similar, idea might be generated multiple times.Read More

Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea

Published Research

In a wide variety of settings, organizations generate a number of possible solutions to a problem—ideas—and then select a few for further development. We examine the effectiveness of two group structures for such tasks—the team structure, in which the group works together in time and space, and the hybrid structure, in which individuals first work independently and then work together.Read More