SPEAKER

Dr. Cheng Gao
NBD Bancorp Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Assistant Professor of Strategy
Ross School Of Business
University Of Michigan

ABSTRACT

In category-defying nascent industries, uncertainty over which regulatory agency has jurisdiction is often a major source of dependence for pioneering organizations. How do organizations manage regulatory jurisdictional uncertainty? We conduct an inductive, in-depth qualitative research study on how organizations pioneering the nascent cultivated-meat industry effectively navigate jurisdictional uncertainty. Drawing on hand-collected semi-structured interviews as well as extensive archival data and field work, we uncover stratagems and processes that entrepreneurial ventures and organizations deploy to induce, manage, and influence contestation over regulatory jurisdiction. Our resulting theoretical framework, organized around three phases consisting of jurisdictional uncertainty, jurisdictional contestation, and jurisdictional convergence, unpacks the underlying mechanisms of such strategies and theorizes how they enable organizations to manage overlapping regulators and ultimately influence the regulatory scaffolding of an emergent nascent industry. A unique aspect of our study is that it examines the rich interactions and dynamics between the wide range of disparate actors that comprise new technology-enabled industries: new ventures, incumbents, non-profit organizations, and regulators. Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for research on entrepreneurial strategy, non-market strategy, organization theory, and technological innovation. More generally, it provides a fresh perspective on how organizations navigate and shape the uncertain nascent markets in which they attempt to create.

SPEAKER

Dr. Marvin Hanisch
Assistant professor
Innovation Management & Strategy Department
University of Groningen

ABSTRACT

Blockchain technology presents a potential solution for governing complex organizational networks through partial automation. A critical decision for founders of enterprise blockchains relates to whether the algorithmic governance layer native to the blockchain should be supplemented by costly administrative controls that can facilitate coordination and reduce opportunistic risks. We hypothesize that founders of enterprise blockchains will evaluate this tradeoff in favor of adopting administrative controls as the number and variety of founders and the rivalry and interdependency among founders increase. We test our theory on a unique sample of 128 blockchain initiatives and find that different administrative controls are employed by blockchain founders in response to different costs of coordination and opportunism. We complement our primary analysis with a study of the configurations of governance conditions that lead to blockchain discontinuation. Our study advances theories on network governance and contributes to the emerging literature on blockchains.

SPEAKER

Dr. Carolyn Stein
Assistant professor
Haas School of Business and Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley

ABSTRACT

University-based scientific research has long been argued to be a central source of commercial innovation and economic growth.  Yet at the same time, there have been long-held concerns that many university-based discoveries never realize their potential social benefits.  Looking across universities, research and commercialization activities such as start-up formation vary tremendously – variation that could reflect the composition and orientation of faculty research, university-level factors such as patenting and licensing efforts, or broader place-based factors such as location in a technology cluster.  We take a first step towards unpacking this heterogeneity in university commercialization by analyzing how the propensity of academic research to spill over to commercial innovation changes when academics move across universities. Our estimates suggest that at least 20–30% of geographic variation in commercial spillovers from university-based research is attributable to place-specific factors.

SPEAKER

Dr. Li Huang
Associate Professor
Organisational Behaviour
INSEAD Business School

ABSTRACT

Influenced by a classical philosophical notion that a person’s authentic self is their fount of happiness, organizational scholars have adopted an affective and introspective lens and studied employees’ experience of personal inauthenticity as an obstacle to their own wellbeing and work engagement. Overlooked is a parallel notion corroborated by recent psychology research that people also see their authentic self a source of virtue and inauthenticity a threat to their moral self-concept. Drawing from the distancing account of the self-concept protection theory in social psychology, the current research proposes a two-stage, organization-specific defense response through which organizational members experiencing personal inauthenticity are motivated to espouse organizational cynicism, a negative attitude comprising of the belief that the organization lacks integrity as well as organization-directed negative affect and disparaging behaviors. Adopting a full-cycle research approach, we conducted a cross-lagged survey study, an experiment, and three multi-wave survey studies (with one of them pre-registered) to provide consistent support for our theoretical model and exclude trait cynicism and negative affectivity as alternative explanations. We discuss implications of this defense response for the personal authenticity of organizational members and the moral legitimacy of organizations.

SPEAKER

Dr. Yonghoon Lee
Assistant Professor
Department of Management
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

ABSTRACT

Informal networks can help fund managers access information embedded in the networks, but they can also expose managers to the hazard of social herding. Drawing on hedge funds industry, we theorize that the type of information managers use provides a condition under which the value of information access outweighs the hazard of social herding, and vice versa. We test our hypotheses with a triple difference design, leveraging 1) the collapse of Lehman Brothers that caused managers to exchange information through informal networks and 2) the difference between long–short funds relying on soft information, and relative value funds relying on hard information. We find that being connected to informal networks has a net-positive effect on the performance of long–short funds but has a net-negative effect for relative value funds.

SPEAKER

Dr. Isabel Fernandez-Mateo
Adecco Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Chair, Strategy and Entrepreneurship Faculty
London Business School

ABSTRACT

We argue that gender inequality in the innovation process means that scientific ideas are less likely to be used for technology development if their author is a woman versus a man. Testing this claim empirically is difficult because men and women may work on different ideas whose technological potential is largely unobservable. To address this challenge, we exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries in science – i.e., instances when a man and a woman publish the same idea around the same time – and track the citations that those papers receive in patented inventions. We find that scientific papers receive 37% fewer citations in patents, that is, they have a lower technological impact, when they are authored by women. This gap does not appear driven by gender differences in the saliency of the scientists’ publications, but rather by inventors’ paying more attention to male-authored research. We also examine the work that the scientists in our data produce based on their simultaneous discoveries. While women subsequently publish at the same rate and in better journals than their male colleagues do, their publications have nevertheless a much lower technological impact. Our research highlights that gender inequality shapes more than individuals’ careers. It also shapes the extent to which ideas are used to create new technologies. We discuss the implications of this finding for research on innovation and gender inequality in science and technology.

SPEAKER

Dr. Justin M. Berg
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Stanford University

ABSTRACT

Creators who generate hit products enjoy outsize success in creative industries. But too often, creators fail to learn from their initial hits, as their subsequent products lack the audience appeal of their initial hits. In this paper, I develop theory on when and how creators learn to sustain success in creative industries, focusing on how creators’ learning is shaped by the novelty (vs. typicality) of their initial hits. I propose that creators who develop relatively novel initial hits are more likely to learn sustainable capabilities that enhance the audience appeal of their subsequent creations, helping them generate additional hits after their initial one. I tested the proposed theory using two studies: an archival study of 1,601 authors in the U.S. book publishing industry, as well as a complementary experiment to address causality. Results from the archival study showed that book authors with relatively novel initial hits had better subsequent hit rates—a likely indicator of learning—than authors with relatively typical initial hits. In the experiment, participants developed two ideas for television shows, and the novelty and purported success of their first ideas were both manipulated. Participants’ performance improved from their first to second ideas only when their first ideas were novel and (ostensibly) hits with the audience, providing causal evidence that creators learn more effectively from novel than typical initial hits. Whereas prior research suggests that individuals learn best from multiple episodes of success, failure, or both over time, this research suggests that creators who achieve novel initial hits can and do learn from one episode of extreme success.

This is a joint seminar organized by HKU Business School’s Marketing Area and Management & Strategy Area.

SPEAKER

Prof. Maggie Chuoyan Dong
Head of School and Professor 
School of Marketing
UNSW

ABSTRACT

Although the supply chain (SC) literature has discussed the influence of the political environment on global SC decisions, the role of political leaders has been overlooked. To fill this research void, we predict and show that the turnover of a country’s top political leader (hereafter, “politician turnover”) increases policy uncertainty in the country, which drives multinational corporations (MNCs) to adjust their SC involvement there. We also identify three politician-related contingency factors: the market-friendliness of the successor relative to the incumbent, the length of the successor’s political career, and corruption in the turnover country. In an analysis of politician turnover events from 2003 to 2018 and the global supplier-customer relationships of US-incorporated MNCs, we find that politician turnover causes MNCs to reduce SC involvement (measured as the proportions of an MNC’s customers, suppliers, and the transaction volume that are located in the turnover country). The negative effect of politician turnover on SC involvement is exacerbated by corruption in the turnover country, mitigated when the successor has a long political career, and exacerbated when the successor is less market-friendly than the incumbent; the effect becomes positive when the successor is more market-friendly than the incumbent.

SPEAKER

Dr. Lindsey Cameron
Assistant Professor of Management
Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

This research explores how a new relation of production—specifically, the shift from human to algorithms as managers on digital platforms—reconfigures and repurposes workplace consent.  Drawing on a five-year qualitative study of the largest sector in the gig economy, the ridehailing industry, I describe how workers navigate being managed by an algorithm. I begin by showing how algorithms segment the work at multiple sites of human-algorithm interactions. While some research suggests that this segmentation creates a hyper-monitored environment system that stifles workers’ discretion, I find that the reconfiguration of the work process actually allows for more frequent choice. These choices, which I label engagement and deviance tactics, while narrow, are real and ultimately and ultimately do the work of manufacturing consent in the on-demand workplace. Yet due to the fungible nature of the algorithm management system and the independent contractor work arrangement, consent is more fragile than previously theorized.

SPEAKER

Prof. John Horton
Economist and the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Professor
Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER
MIT

ABSTRACT

There is a strong association between the quality of the writing in a resume for new labor market entrants and whether those entrants are ultimately hired. We show that this relationship is, at least partially, causal: a field experiment in an online labor market was conducted with nearly half a million jobseekers in which a treated group received algorithmic writing assistance. Treated jobseekers experienced an 8% increase in the probability of getting hired. Contrary to concerns that the assistance is taking away a valuable signal, we find no evidence that employers were less satisfied. We present a model in which better writing is not a signal of ability but instead helps employers ascertain ability, which rationalizes our findings.