Organizing Knowledge Production Teams Within Firms for Innovation

Published Research

How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? Although access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity of inventor-held knowledge within a given knowledge production team. Read More

Teams for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Funded Research Proposal

Grand Innovation Prizes are contests where a prize is given for the first team to achieve a radical technical goal–such as reaching space with a commercial passenger rocket. The phenomenon of GIPs have become an important topic for study in recent years.Read More

Team Incentives: Evidence from a Firm Level Experiment

Published Research

Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment designed to evaluate the impact of rank incentives and tournaments on the productivity and composition of teams.Read More

Why seeking help from teammates is a blessing and a curse:  A theory of help seeking and individual creativity in team contexts

Published Research

Research has not explored the extent to which seeking help from teammates positively relates to a person’s own creativity. This question is important to explore as help seeking is commonly enacted in organizations and may come with reciprocation costs that may also diminish creativity.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