Research

Hanbin Yang

Assistant Professor of Finance, London Business School

Howard Kung

Associate Professor of Finance, London Business School

Roberto Gomez Cram

Assistant Professor of Finance, London Business School

This study will combine a novel dataset covering over 20,000 licensing agreements with firm patents and financials to create a comprehensive view of returns to investment in intangible assets. By combining licensing royalty rates with innovation outputs, we will quantify how firms monetize intangible capital and assess the economic value of R&D beyond traditional accounting measures. We shall also use licensing agreements between firms to characterize the network of technology diffusion. This network structure allows us to study competition among innovative firms and the welfare implication of innovation policy 

Ahmed Tahoun

Professor of Accounting, London Business School

Daron Acemoğlu

Institute Professor, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tarek Alexander Hassan

Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Boston University

This project explores how the social status of entrepreneurs—used as a lens to measure cultural perception—influences entrepreneurial activity across countries and over time. By analysing personal writings such as memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies, and applying natural language processing, we introduce a novel methodology to quantify how entrepreneurs are culturally portrayed: with admiration, ambivalence, or stigma. This innovative approach connects cultural attitudes to entrepreneurial behaviour, providing new insights for policymakers and educators on how shifting societal perceptions can foster innovation and broaden participation in entrepreneurship. 

Dalbert Ma

PhD student, London Business School

Keyvan Vakili

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School

Generative AI is lowering the marginal cost of producing code, text, and images, promising large outward shifts of the productivity frontier and a surge in output. Yet because its productivity gains are uneven across tasks, the same technology may re-direct incentives: away from upstream exploration toward downstream exploitation. We test this idea in software, tracing programming-language births, usage, and project creation in one of the largest open-source repositories. Comparing venture-backed start-ups with legacy incumbents - and leveraging variation in GenAI performance across languages - we identify who reallocates effort, who reskills, and how innovation patterns evolve. 

Alexander Hayward

Executive Fellow, Accounting, London Business School

Randall Peterson

Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School

Family Office Culture and Value Creation Building on the authors' experiencing analysing the setup, structures and investment strategies of over 100 Family Offices, this research project addresses a critical and underexplored area at the intersection of organisational behaviour and wealth management, particularly within the unique context of family offices. Family offices are increasingly influential in global capital markets, yet their internal cultures remain opaque. Understanding how cultural dynamics within these entities influence decision-making, governance, and long-term value creation is essential. This research aims to fill that gap by employing a rigorous, evidence-based approach. 

Brian K. Baik,

Harvard Business School, D∧3 Institute

Marcel Olbert,

Assistant Professor of Accounting, London Business School

Florin Vasvari,

Professor of Accounting; Chair, Accounting Faculty; Academic Director, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital, London Business School

This paper offers the first systematic evidence on environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosures provided by a global sample of private equity (PE) firms. Using historical websites from 2000 to 2021, we develop a novel measure of voluntary PE firm ESG disclosures. We find that these disclosures have been increasing over time, irrespective of the firms’ investment strategy, size, listing status or investment location. We investigate disclosure determinants and document that PE firms’ ESG disclosures are associated with mandatory ESG regulations aimed at publicly listed firms in countries of PE firms’ portfolio companies. ESG disclosures also increase when PE firms voluntarily sign up to United Nations’ standards of responsible investing and around fundraising events. Finally, we examine whether PE firms’ ESG disclosures match their investment activities. We find that PE firms with high environmental disclosures target portfolio companies with lower environmental toxic releases. Further, the funds of PE firms with high ESG disclosures achieve better returns. Overall, these findings indicate that PE firms’ take actions consistent with their ESG disclosures.

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Abhishek Bhatia

PhD student, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School

Gary Dushnitsky

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School

The scale-up phase in nascent companies plays a pivotal role in the entrepreneurial landscape. It is the stage where companies transition from promising startups to sustainable, high-growth ventures. Understanding the challenges faced during this phase is essential for both entrepreneurs and policymakers. This research paper delves into a significant constraint – ‘product market fit’ – confronting the scale up decisions. Using novel customer-level data for marketing automation technology startups, we study the interplay between the rate of scaling (customer acquisition) and sustained competitive advantage (customer retention). Relying on the exogenous reduction in suitability of the technology to cater to the market demand due the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework in the European Union, we empirically demonstrate that a company’s ability to scale and grow sustainably is intricately linked to the existence of a viable market for its product. i.e., its ‘product market fit’. The findings offer one potential resolution for the debate in entrepreneurship practice and literature about the optimal approach to scaling.

Alicia Riolino

PhD Candidate, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School

Brandon Freiberg

PhD Candidate, Columbia Business School

Our paper aims to quantify the impact of gender discrimination in entrepreneurial fundraising on product markets. We start by examining the relationship between the start-up founder's gender, the target audience, and the gender composition of its user base. We argue that if female founders are more likely to start businesses targeting female users, gender discrimination by investors will lead to a scarcity of products for women. Using unique, large-scale data and natural language processing, we measure the customer orientation of a startup (i.e., the gender of targeted end-users) and track measures of startup success, including start-up lifespan and fundraising outcomes, and connect how these outcomes relate to founder gender.

Michael Jacobides

Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School

John Paul MacDuffie

Professor of Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Jennifer Tae

Assistant Professor of Management, Temple University

How do major technological and business model transitions happen in the economy? When sectors change, be it because of climate change (as in the shift from Internal Combustion Engine to Battery Electric Vehicles) or due to technological opportunities (as in the rise of autonomy and shift from car ownership to mobility solutions), who drives innovation and who benefits? Drawing on the automotive sector and mobility we find that neither the “Schumpeter Mark I” model of innovation brought about by disruptive entrants, nor the “Mark II” model of innovation internalized in large, vertically integrated firms describes reality. We thus explore a new “Mark III” regime where incumbents survive by co-opting new firms and building ecosystems around them, while increasingly ceding part of their ground and inevitably collaborating with a handful of Big Tech firms. We consider implications for strategy and competition policy.

Jefferson Abraham

PhD student in Accounting 

Marcel Olbert

Assistant Professor of Accounting 

Florin Vasvari

Professor of Accounting 

Global investors’ focus on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of companies is one of the most important developments in the areas of global capital allocation as well as accounting and disclosure regulation. While there is a nascent stream of research on the relevance of ESG in the public equity (mostly mutual fund) market and regulatory bodies start to mandate ESG disclosures for large publicly listed firms, we know little about the impact of ESG investing in the private equity market despite its large economic relevance. 

This project aims to explore the relevance, the specific strategies, and the outcomes of ESG investing of private equity firms which are responsible for a substantial fraction of the global capital allocation. To this end, the project will develop a new measure of private equity firms’ ESG focus through the firms’ disclosure on their websites over the last two decades. Empirical analyses will then explore how disclosed ESG strategies are reflected in private equity firms’ investment decisions and their effects on portfolio companies’ financial performance. 

Building on the prior literature examining the impact of private equity buyouts on portfolio companies, our analyses will study how different ESG strategies interact with employment outcomes, investment growth, cost cutting, and tax avoidance strategies.

Nina Teng

PhD student in Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Firms are increasingly using corporate entrepreneurship strategies—particularly startup innovation contests like accelerators, incubators, challenges and hackathons—to search widely for innovative, breakthrough ideas to adopt and commercialize. However, do corporate entrepreneurship contests promote the innovativeness of startups by design? I aim to study the following research question in the context of global corporate accelerator contests: do startup ideas that win template-based innovation contests have lower innovativeness? The findings of this research could have policy implications for how innovation contests—particularly the startup selection and training processes—could be designed to address a potential innovativeness paradox that could undermine the contest organizers’ original intent to seek the most innovative ideas. At the same time, startup firms could also re-assess the potential implications of participating in innovation contests on the innovativeness of their ideas.

Marcel Olbert

Assistant Professor in Accounting 

Dr. Peter Severin 

PhD in Finance from the University of Mannheim and Senior Consultant at Deloitte

We study the economic consequences of private equity buyouts with a focus on local governments as a stakeholder in private equity portfolio firms.

Exploiting over 12,000 deals and private firm data in Europe, we document that portfolio firms' decrease their tax payments and effective tax rates decrease by 10-15%. At the same time, the firms grow in profitability and capital investment.

Building on these firm-level results, we exploit the staggered nature of private equity buyouts at the local geographic levels to examine the net effect of lower tax payments but higher growth for local governments’ public finances. 

We document that local governments’ corporate tax revenues significantly decrease after private equity transactions in their constituency. Further, governments seem to decrease their spending and maintain debt levels constant following local private equity transactions.

Collectively, our findings suggest that some private equity investors impose a negative externality on local domestic governments through increased tax avoidance in target firms without creating large enough positive spillovers for other tax bases.

Emre Ozdenoren

Professor of Economics

Mayur Choudhary

PhD student in Finance

We examine the nature of contracts that may arise between entrepreneurs and investor firms in an environment with asymmetric information and search frictions. In our model the entrepreneurs may be productive or unproductive. The productive entrepreneurs occasionally generate high output which can be interpreted as a successful business idea. The unproductive entrepreneurs never produce high output. Entrepreneurs have noisy private information about their productivity, and they have access to an outside option if they decide to quit. If an entrepreneur produces high output, then both the entrepreneur and the market learn that the entrepreneur is productive. We assume that at this point the entrepreneur obtains a large reward. Investors face a trade-off in posting the optimal wage. A lower wage leads to advantageous selection as it attracts only those entrepreneurs who are more likely to be productive. However, restricting search to these more optimistic entrepreneurs leads to a longer search increasing the firm’s recruitment cost. The equilibrium features learning about the productivity of entrepreneurs, endogenous quitting, and poaching by other firms. The equilibrium wage depends on the initial distribution of entrepreneur types, their speed of learning, poaching rate and their bargaining power relative to the entrepreneur. The model has applications beyond entrepreneurship finance as a model of selection with endogenous wage where workers and firms learn about the match productivity on the job.

Keun Woo Jeong

PhD student in Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Keyvan Vakili

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

While studies document various individual and firm-level outcomes of gender- and family-oriented policies, surprisingly little research has documented how these policies fundamentally alter the type and direction of value produced by the impacted actors. In this proposal, we aim to address this gap by tracking the changes in the innovation activities and output of all inventors in the U.S. following the state-level policy interventions that are gender- and family-oriented. We use the population of granted patents listed in the USPTO from 1980 to 2018 as our sample frame. We focus on two policies: abortion restriction and paid family leave act. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences design, we examine the changes in the types of innovation at the state and inventor levels in response to implementation of these policies across different states over time. Our findings can shed light on how gender- and family-oriented policies can differentially affect inventors’ innovative behavior based on their gender and other characteristics.

Freek Vermeulen

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Joao Cotter Salvado

PhD Candidate, Strategy and Entrepreneurship


Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in understanding the role of language as a way to manage the perception of the stock market about organisational decisions. Accordingly, organisational research has examined how organisations influence investors’ response by framing their actions differently, i.e. selectively conveying certain preferred meanings and interpretations, while hiding others (Fiss & Zajac, 2006; Rhee & Fiss, 2014; Westphal & Zajac, 1998). Furthermore, accounting and behavioral finance research has examined how stock pricing responds to the use of particular language characteristics, such as tone (Henry, 2008; Huang, Teoh, & Zhang, 2014; Price, Doran, Peterson, & Bliss, 2012) or complexity (Hwang & Kim, 2017; Li, 2008; Loughran & McDonald, 2014) in companies’ disclosures. Overall, the precise choice of language has been reported to be able to moderate the stock market’s reaction to particular events or pieces of information.

With this project, we intend to explore CEO’s use of language in the communication of strategic innovation to the financial market. Our basic premise is that the effectiveness of different linguistic features will depend on the degree of innovativeness of the new strategy being presented. 

Aldona Kapačinskaitė

PhD student, Strategy and Entrepreneurship

This study explores how an exogenous shock to the price in the product market in one industry engendered employment and founding of new establishments in a younger, substitute industry. The argument is that in industries where assets such as human capital have strong redeployment potential, intra-industry competitive interactions may lead to an improved performance of related industries. In the energy sector, I find that the sharp fall in the price of oil at the end of 2014 engendered a high level of turnover. I study the movement of oil and gas onshore and offshore workers to solar and wind energy firms in Texas and the North Sea, respectively. I find that areas with more oil and gas activity were more likely to see an increase in solar and wind power development in terms of employment, number of establishments and production capacity following the shock.

Why do firms respond differently to the entry and rise of digital innovations and how does this heterogeneity shape firms and their sector?

Michael Jacobides

Sir Donald Gordon Chair of Entrepreneurship and Innovation; Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Nina Teng
Visiting PhD candidate in Strategy and Entrepreneurship

This project examines the puzzle of why similar firms react in vastly different ways to the impact of digital innovations within a business ecosystem; and how these firms’ strategies in response to innovations affect industry structure and value creation. We aim to contribute an empirical case study to nascent literature on how firms’ strategic responses to digital innovations shape industry architectures, value chains, and ecosystems. Through an inductive, qualitative approach focused on case studies of automotive OEM’s strategic responses to the entry and rise of digital ride-hailing firms in Asia, we plan to examine: (a) how automotive OEMs formulate their strategic responses to the entry and rise of digital ride-hailing innovations (and why these differ); (b) how digital ride-hailing firms view their strategic partnerships with OEMs and other ecosystem stakeholders; and, as a result (c) how firms’ strategies and partnerships change a sector, by providing (potentially competing) templates to organise a new (digital) ecosystem. Our objective is to study how OEM heterogeneity drives their response, and how this sets in motion the dynamics of industry transformation and of the creation of novel business ecosystems.

Jonathan Berman

Associate Professor of Marketing

Nazli Okutur

Doctoral student in Marketing

We investigate how the process of budgeting for charity affects the amount of money people give. While most research in charitable giving focuses on how individual organisations can increase the effectiveness of any single appeal, we know little about how individuals choose to budget for multiple charities, and to what extent the budgeting processes itself effect total giving. We find evidence for a strong order effect when allocating money via a charitable giving platform: individuals donate more money when first deciding which charities to support before allocating a budget as opposed to setting a budget prior to choosing which charities to support.

Charities play a pivotal role in improving lives and supporting communities around the world. Yet, most of the time they struggle to achieve financial sustainability. According to a report published by Charities Aid Foundation, 57% of the charity leaders in the UK say that generating more income is the most pressing challenge they face and over a third of the leaders (34%) are concerned about the reduction in public/government funding (Charities Aid Foundation, Feb 2017). The problem also extends to social entrepreneurs in general who are working to solve society’s most troubling problems, while at the same time trying to attract enough funding to cover their costs (Carpenter & Lauritzen, 2016). This is particularly concerning, given the findings that the public demand for the services of social enterprises is increasing and lacking the financial resources to meet this demand can push these organisations to breaking point.

Aldona Kapačinskaitė

PhD student, Strategy and Entrepreneurship

This project aims at uncovering conditions under which entry into a focal market is beneficial to the incumbent in a multisided market. The paper argues that competition can be beneficial to the extent that market size is not fixed, competition induces firms to innovate and firms are able to observe and learn from one another’s experience. I study this question in the context of platforms that host a set of complements (mobile applications). The predictions are that developers in markets of unfixed size benefit from entry in terms of subscriptions, and innovate more. Learning is moderated by the frequency of competitor’s activity while innovation efforts spill over to other platforms.

Alex Edmans

Professor of Finance

Vivian Fang

Assistant Professor Accounting, University of Minnesota

Allen Huang

Associate Professor Accounting, HKUST Business School

This paper shows that short-term stock price concerns induce CEOs to take value-reducing actions. Vesting equity, our measure of short-term concerns, is positively associated with the probability of a firm repurchasing shares, the amount of shares repurchased, and the probability of the firm announcing a merger and acquisition (M&A). When vesting equity increases, both repurchases and M&A have more positive short-term returns but more negative long-term returns. Overall, by identifying actions that carry clear value implications, this paper documents the long-term negative consequences of short-term incentives.

Amrita Kundu

PhD student, Management Science and Operations

Kamalini Ramdas

Professor of Management Science and Operations; Deloitte Chair in Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Stephen Anderson-Macdonald

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stanford

Two-thirds of the population in sub-Saharan Africa live without access to modern electricity. A wave of data-driven solar companies are filling this gap by providing off-grid electricity. Fast adoption is key. The question we ask is how can we improve adoption of solar and other technologies in emerging markets? Preliminary analysis suggests that these customers – are sensitive to good service perhaps even more than the barriers affordability and awareness – especially given the close-knit social structures in emerging markets that can make Word-of-Mouth marketing (WOM) an important channel.

WOM remains a concept with little empirical evidence and the role of after-sales service as a marketing channel through WOM is untested. We address two critical questions relating to after sales service and technology adoption in emerging markets; first whether it significantly impacts the decision to adopt technology and second whether it is an effective marketing channel (through WOM).

Elias Papaioannou

Professor of Economics

Giorgio Chiovelli

Research Fellow

Stelios Michalopoulos

Associate Professor of Economic, Brown University

This project assesses the long-run development impact of a major aspect of colonization, concessions to private corporations. First, we use colonial archives to compile an original pan-African dataset with digitized maps covering all concessions and their main features (e.g., crop, mineral, practice of forced labour, revenues. Then we examine the legacy of colonial concessions on contemporary development (income, self-employment, education, and public goods), conflict (major wars, one-sided violence against civilians), and culture (trust and beliefs).

We test causation using two novel identification techniques (i) comparing outcomes just inside and just outside the historical boundaries of colonial concession using spatial regression and ii) using interaction of soil-terrain quality for specific minerals and goods (rubber, cotton, palm oil) with world prices of these goods during African colonization.

Freek Vermeulen

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Most firms use some form of visual frameworks to capture and communicate their strategies.

These visualisations are used as sense-making devices, to frame and agree on a strategic course of action and subsequently to communicate a strategy to other stakeholders in the form of a presentation. Such visual frameworks are ubiquitous in the business world but we don’t understand when they are effective and in what form.

We intend to study the use and influence of strategy frameworks in a company’s communication to the financial market, specifically in the context of acquisition announcements to analysts to explain the nature and objectives of the acquisition. Such strategies tend to be unique and innovative and necessitate more sense-making to investors.

We intend to distinguish between calls with and without a visual presentation (in the form of a PowerPoint presentation). We undertake an event-study, examining the precise content of the sense-making presentations, and particularly their visualisation, as independent variables. Our moderator will be the degree of innovativeness of the strategy that the acquisition represents.

Iris Steenkamp

PhD student, Marketing

Rajesh Chandy

Professor of Marketing; Tony and Maureen Wheeler Chair in Entrepreneurship; Academic Director of the Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Om Narasimhan

Professor of Marketing at LSE

This research addresses an important question on the social impact of migration of women: how their status is perceived by (i) themselves and (ii) by others. We use a unique mechanism to explain this impact: consumption.

We study these questions in the context of migration facilitated by an organization which represents a substantial component of the migration flows that occur in the world today. We focus on a quasi-experiment involving organised migration of female textile workers from rural to urban India. The nature of organised migration enables us to compare individual-level data and exploit exogenous variation in order to make causal inferences. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to causally assess the social impact of migration at the level of the individual migrant. It is also the first the formally study the potentially transformative impact of organised migration.

Rui Silva

Assistant Professor of Finance

Ramin P. Baghai

Associate Professor of Finance, Stockholm School of Economics

A central question in finance relates to the choices firms make when deciding to finance new investments – particularly whether to go public and raise funds in in public equity markets. Although primarily about financing, the implications of such corporate action may be more far-reached, affecting the firm’s relation with its employees (and thus, their labour force composition) and its brand value.

There are many reasons why IPOs may affect workers. The firm becomes more immune to financial constraints and as such become less risky. This could affect the type of workers that may choose to work for such firms. The relaxation of financial constraints may allow firms to pay more to current employees as well as bid more aggressively for external talent. Publicity may also entice outside employees to join the firm as well as insiders to remain. Finally, incentives change: pre-IPO equity-holding employees had incentives to exert effort in order to cash out in a successful IPO; post-IPO, that incentive is no longer there, which may make the optimal compensation more dependent on performance metrics.

We test these effects using detailed employer-employee matched data from Statistics Sweden.

Rui Silva

Assistant Professor of Finance

Ramin P. Baghai

Associate Professor of Finance, Stockholm School of Economics

Luofu Ye

University Scholar at Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Team production is one of the most important and common ways to organize production in the economy. However, there is little evidence on which environments and corporate actions promote the creation of productive team configurations. In this project we study the impact of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) on the composition of teams and their productivity. We focus on inventors in the United States, a group that is of special interest for several reasons: (i) their output—innovation—is of impactds overall economic prosperity; (ii) there exist accurate measures of individual labour productivity (numbers of patents and citations generated, value of patents generated); and (iii) team production can be measured using information on the subset of inventors co-authoring different patents.

Since co-authors of patents span subunits of, rather than the entire firm, we can use this information as proxy for the network of collaborations of different inventors within firms.

Many M&As aim to combine resources from different organizations. Here we shed light on the ability of firms to integrate human resources from the two independent organizations into a single production unit, the timing of that integration, and the extent to which it ultimately leads to increased innovation productivity for the merged firm.

Nuno Clara

PhD Student, Finance

This paper studies the impact of product demand on innovation and asset prices. In particular I ask whether the elasticity of the demand faced by a firm matter for cross-sectional market outcomes and innovation? I make use of high-frequency price and quantity data of retail products sold on Amazon to estimate elasticities of demand. The high-frequency data allows me to reduce the standard endogeneity concerns of prices being jointly determined with quantities sold – in particular, I measure the elasticity encountered by a firm by focusing on how demand reacts within a very narrow window around a price change. This allows me to identify shifts along the demand curve due to the price change. Preliminary findings suggest that firms selling products with high elasticities of demand earn an annual return premium of 6.2% over firms dealing with more inelastic demands. Also, firms with higher demand elasticities do not seem to adjust their prices more frequently even when competitors change their prices or new products are introduced in the market.

Isabel Fernandez-Mateo

Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Michaël Bikard

Assistant Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship

This project re-examines the well-established finding that female scientists produce fewer publications and patents than their male counterparts. We propose to study gender differences in “scientific style” as a potential explanation for this phenomenon. We consider the possibility that women report their findings in a manner that subsequently prompts less scientific recognition and a lower access to commercial opportunities. We will test this argument by analysing the content of 236 “paper twins,” in which male and female academic scientists independently published papers reporting essentially the same discovery. This work will contribute to the sociology of science and innovation, as well as to our understanding of how to best utilize scientific talent in entrepreneurial settings.

Bryan Stroube

Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Robert Vesco

University of Maryland & Bloomberg

Innovators seek the counsel of their peers in settings such as academia, R&D labs, and startups. This is because helpful feedback on early-stage ideas can improve innovative outcomes by providing complementary knowledge and lowering search costs. However, providing helpful feedback is costly, so why do peers do it? One explanation is they are motivated by the social status it can provide. This project explores the two dominant explanations for pursuing status: some individuals pursue it for the resources it attracts (pragmatists) while others pursue it because they value the deference of their peers (egoists). We leverage an exogenous change in the visibility of peer recognition in an online community for technology entrepreneurs to infer which of these explanations, if either, dominates. Initial empirical findings indicate that the production of feedback in this community is driven by both of these underlying motives.

Freek Vermeulen

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Since the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa new Safari Parks have been founded. Many of these are purely commercial operations, exploited for commercial use through tourism. Some others have been initiated by the government or by NGOs – such as the NGO Peace Parks – to settle border disputes between neighboring countries and bring welfare to local communities. This environment is a prime example of a setting where firms have to carefully manage the balance between commercial interests on the one hand, and preservation and social interests on the other. The question here is whether Safari Parks founded using a business model specifically aimed at balancing commercial and social interest perform better (both in commercial and social terms) than Parks founded with an emphasis on either one (i.e. specifically to exploit commercial interest or specifically to advance social interests). We will collect longitudinal data to examine this particular issue systematically in a quantitative empirical study.

Freek Vermeulen

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Prior research shows that early events in a region can create an institutional legacy that leads to the long-term persistence of certain types of organizational behavior. By contrast, I argue that early events may also imprint an environment in such a way that it fosters a norm of innovation, leading organizations to seek change and adaptation rather than persistence, which manifest long after the events have taken place. I aim to test this perspective using data on firms in the Traditional Chinese Medicine industry in the first half of the 1990s, when firms using this local, indigenous technology were confronted with the onset of a global substitute: “Western-style” chemical drugs. I am already able to show that firms in regions that were under communist rule in the late 1940s, where Mao stimulated experimentation with Western-style drugs treating wounded soldiers, nearly half a century later were more inclined to break industry norms and innovate by introducing “hybrid products” in the market: new products using elements adopted from chemical drugs.

The proposed study’s primary contribution is to show that historical events can create an institutional legacy that fosters innovation, by stimulating firms to deviate from existing industry norms when environmental circumstances are changing.

Keyvan Vakili

Assistant Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship

In prior research, we show that the implementation of TRIPS has increased investment in basic science on neglected diseases in low-income countries, potentially through cultivating better institutions of science. The question remains, whether the produced knowledge on neglected diseases in these countries are further adopted by academic and industrial labs, locally and globally. In this project, I explore this question in depth. In particular, I investigate the impact of TRIPS agreement on the diffusion of indigenous knowledge on neglected diseases, produced in low-income countries, within subsequent scientific papers, patents, and clinical trials. I further explore the variance in knowledge diffusion across disease categories and geographical location. The results can shed light on the impact of intellectual property rights on knowledge transfer, the broader institutions required for the global diffusion of scientific knowledge, and the remaining challenges in front of eradicating neglected diseases.

Nicos Savva

Associate Professor of Management Science and Operations

Christopher J Chen

PhD Candidate, Management Science and Operations

This empirical study proposes to identify how the operational policies of hospitals are affected by variability in financial flows and to determine the impact of these changes on patient outcomes. We propose to exploit endowment returns as an exogenous source of variation in hospitals' financial flows and through this, examine how financial health impacts patient length-of-stay, staffing levels, medical inventory position, avoidable errors, readmissions, and mortality rates. Given the connection between operating procedures and patient outcomes, the results will offer managerial insights into designing novel processes that alleviate the impact of financial constraints on quality of care as well as potential policy insights as to the implementation of cutbacks. The funding provided by DIIE will be used to augment the publicly available datasets already in our possession with two proprietary datasets.

 Alex Edmans

Professor of Finance

Based on the conventional wisdom, there is widespread belief that short-termism of management (i.e. failure to innovate) is caused by short-termism of investors. Hillary Clinton argued that, by encouraging shareholders to hold their investments for the long-term, this will give companies the freedom to undertake long-term projects, rather than being pressured to pursue short-term profit. However, according to the common wisdom short-term trading by investors need not equate to short-term behaviour by managers. Instead, short-term trading can be based on a firm’s long-term value, and thus encourage managers to think long-term. The goal of this paper is to evaluate these conflicting views, and study whether short-term investor horizons cause short-term behaviour by management. For management behaviour, we intend to study investment, e.g. R&D, advertising, capital expenditure, innovation output (e.g. patent citations). For investor horizons, we intend to measure variables such as the average holding period, or the portfolio turnover rate. The paper will study how capital gains tax affects innovation incentives.

Gah-Yi Vhan

Assistant Professor of Management Science and Operations

The ubiquitous presence of micro-level data is changing business decision-making. E-commerce companies such as Otto (largest European online retailer), Uber, and Rue La La (a flash sale fashion start-up) successfully employ real-time, dynamic pricing as part of their operational strategy and capture value from innovating revenue management models by using (big) data. Revenue management – the practice of managing product assortments, prices and inventories - is one major area that can benefit from the use of Big Data. My earlier research [1, 2] shows that data-driven decisions can generate the best value if used with the correct methodology. In a series of papers, I aim to develop and investigate innovative new methods for incorporating “Big Data” in revenue management problems. One outcome of this research will be universal insights into how, and to what extent, Big Data can bring value in the practice of revenue management.

Kamalini Ramdas

Professor of Management Science and Operations; Deloitte Chair in Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Stephen Anderson-Macdonald

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stanford

Amrita Kundu

MSE Environmental Systems Engineering, John Hopkins University

Researchers in operations management have been increasingly interested in operational and supply chain disruptions. The research to date on disruptions includes descriptive case-based research, analytical modelling and empirical work. The main focus of OM research on disruptions has been on mature markets supply chains. To our knowledge, little research in operations management has focused on operational or supply chain disruptions in emerging markets, and in particular, on disruptions faced by micro-entrepreneurs – individuals who own and operate very small businesses – in these markets (de Mel et al. 2010). This research intends to: 1) identify and categorize different types of disruptions faced by such micro-entrepreneurs, 2) estimate the effect of different types of disruptions on multiple dimensions of performance including revenues, costs and profits, and 3) estimate the moderating effect of specific operational strategies that micro-entrepreneurs use to improve their resilience to disruptions – i.e., the ability to bounce back post-disruption. This research project is directly focused on understanding micro-entrepreneurs’ businesses and on identifying strategies that can bolster them from disruptions to their business activities.

Nicos Savva

 Associate Professor of Management Science and Operations

Tolga Tezcan

Associate Professor of Management Science and Operations BS (Bilkent) MS (Colorado State) MS PhD (Georgia Tech)

The proposed study is motivated by the chronic underinvestment in Emergency Department (ED) capacity, which leads to overcrowding and long wait times. We conjecture that such problems can be alleviated by an innovative payment scheme (dubbed “pay-for-performance”) which links the ED’s reimbursement to patient waiting times. Our research will investigate whether socially optimal outcomes can be achieved though the appropriate application of “yardstick” competition, where the payer creates indirect competition between ED’s by linking their reimbursement to their relative performance against other ED’s. Our work, which is on the interface of economics and operations management, will contribute to the ongoing debate on how to design innovative reimbursement schemes for one important service offered by hospitals – Emergency Care. Our work, which is on the interface of economics and operations management, will contribute to the ongoing debate on how to design innovative reimbursement schemes for one important service offered by hospitals – Emergency Care.

Rajesh Chandy

Professor of Marketing; Tony and Maureen Wheeler Chair in Entrepreneurship; Academic Director of the Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship 

Om Narasimhan

Professor of Marketing at LSE

Thomas Zhang

A long-standing puzzle is why micro-enterprises in developing countries do not adopt productive practices more readily, even when the practices are accessible and their benefits are clearly demonstrated. Farming, in particular, can be much more productive in many emerging markets with the adoption of relatively simple farming innovations. Innovation adoption is not instantaneous, even if the innovation itself is simple. Innovation adoption takes physical and mental time to ponder and assimilate. We argue that poor infrastructure and pressures of daily life in rural villages leave little slack to adopt innovation, even when such innovations are readily accessible and their benefits are clearly shown. We propose that farmers are hindered in innovation adoption by dearth of slack time. The difficult circumstances and lacking amenities in rural villages do not allow for enough slack time to contemplate and evaluate new innovations for adoption, even when such innovations – and their benefits – are clearly presented to the farmers. A survey is planned to directly capture measures of physical and mental slack.

Naufel Vilcassim

Professor of Marketing, London Business School

Stephen Anderson-Macdonald

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Christy Lazicky

Master’s candidate, Harvard Kennedy School

In this research, we aim to evaluate and further refine the effectiveness of an innovative sampling approach we have developed to identify higher growth-potential entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Building on two on-going studies in Uganda and Rwanda, we will compare, over time, the business performance, practices and psychometrics of entrepreneurs with a high growth potential index (GPI) with that of entrepreneurs with a low GPI to understand how well our approach predicts growth potential. This research aims to assist policy makers better identify target markets for enterprise support programmes designed to stimulate entrepreneurship and economic growth in emerging markets. This research focuses on stimulating entrepreneurship in emerging markets by providing an innovative screening mechanism for policy makers and managers to target entrepreneurship support programmes and partnerships to higher growth-potential entrepreneurs most likely to grow established, employment-generating businesses.