March 25, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
March 25, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Embedded Files
Mahka Moeen (University of Wisconsin) - will present - "From Founders' Knowledge to Economic Value in Academic and Employee Startups"
Abstract: Economic value capture is crucial for entrepreneurial startups, as it conditions the commercial viability of the technological opportunities underlying their founding. Startups vary in whether they capture value, and if so, whether through markets for product or technology. This study posits that value capture hinges on founders’ knowledge accumulated in their prior employment context, separating founders as academic scientists and ex-employees of industry firms. Academic founders bring scientific knowledge from universities and employee founders carry industry-specific knowledge from their former employer. These differences provide the theoretical basis the study empirically explores in U.S. medical device startups. Academic startups tend to capture value in markets for technology, whereas employee startups tend to capture value in markets for product. Further, variations in founders’ history and employment context can amplify or offset knowledge profiles within academic and employee startups toward scientific and commercial dimensions, shifting the resulting value capture pathway.
April 8, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
April 8, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Sukhun Kang (University of California Santa Barbara) - will present "Data Privacy Regulation and Innovation" (with Jennifer Kao, UCLA).
Abstract: This paper examines how data privacy regulations shape innovation. While data privacy regulations are designed to increase data security, they also introduce compliance costs and coordination challenges in settings where collecting, analyzing, and sharing sensitive data is central to innovation. We examine the effect of the European Union (EU)’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the largest data privacy law to date, on the pharmaceutical industry. We find that a significant decline in clinical trial activity among firms more exposed to the reform. Firms reduced both the scale and scope of their trials, enrolling fewer patients, targeting fewer diseases, and operating across fewer sites. While collaborative activity declined overall, we provide evidence that firms adapted by shifting toward existing (rather than new) research collaborators. These findings highlight how data privacy regulations can shape not only the rate of R&D, but also the composition of firms’ R&D activities and the organizational contexts in which innovation is ultimately pursued.
April 22, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
April 22, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Supradeep Dutta (Rutgers University - Camden) - will present. Paper information forthcoming.
April 29, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
April 29, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Megan Lawrence (Vanderbilt University) - will present "Are MBAs Good Entrepreneurs?" (with Evan Rawley and Kylie Hwang)
Abstract: While critics claim that Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs do little to cultivate entrepreneurial talent, many business schools emphasize their role in fostering entrepreneurship. To reconcile these competing perspectives, we develop a framework that distinguishes between entrepreneurial ability and commitment effects on entry, performance and exit. We empirically separate the two effects utilizing a longitudinal dataset of 1,260 hedge fund portfolio managers (1986-2023). The results show that MBAs are more likely to found new ventures and generate superior risk-adjusted returns; however, they are also more likely to exit, conditional on performance. The results are consistent with the interpretation that MBAs are good entrepreneurs but are less committed to entrepreneurship as a career choice.
May 6, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
May 6, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Nelson Ricardo Laverde Cubillos (Insper) - will present "Leading like Scientists"
Abstract: Decision making under uncertainty poses critical challenges for leaders, who must process ambiguous signals, revise their beliefs, and act under time pressure with incomplete information. We argue that these demands are better met by leaders trained in scientific reasoning, those who habitually define problems, derive testable hypotheses, and update beliefs as evidence accumulates. We capture this logic in a simple analytical model in which scientific training and occupational experience increase the returns to experimentation by improving Bayesian updating: STEM trained leaders design more diagnostic tests, generate higher quality signals, and converge to accurate beliefs more quickly than their non STEM peers, particularly when environmental uncertainty is high. We test the model’s implications using the COVID 19 pandemic as a crisis context, exploiting a regression discontinuity design around close mayoral elections in Brazil to compare municipalities narrowly won by STEM trained candidates with those narrowly won by non STEM candidates, approximating quasi random assignment of leadership type. The estimates indicate approximately 36 fewer COVID 19 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants under STEM educated mayors, a substantively large and statistically robust effect stable across alternative bandwidths and specifications. Consistent with the model’s predictions, the advantage is strongest among mayors with longer prior experience in STEM occupations, suggesting that formal training alone is insufficient and that sustained scientific practice deepens the cognitive routines driving better decisions, and appears linked to broader and more timely adoption of non pharmaceutical interventions that shape not only what leaders know, but how they learn.
September 9, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
September 9, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Madeleine Gates (Carnegie Mellon University) - Title forthcoming
September 23, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
September 23, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
September 30, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
September 30, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Thiago Soares (Insper University) - will present "Guarding secrets, losing partners: Strengthening trade secret protection and the decline of interfirm collaboration"
Thiago Soares (Insper University) - will present "Guarding secrets, losing partners: Strengthening trade secret protection and the decline of interfirm collaboration"
Trade secrets are among firms’ most valuable strategic assets, yet their consequences for interfirm collaboration remain underexplored. We argue that stronger trade secret regimes, while making contracting safer, increase the proprietary cost of the pre-contractual disclosures on which partner matching in markets for technology depends. By raising these matching frictions, stronger secrecy reduces the formation of collaborative ties. This effect is strongest in early-stage collaborations, where matching relies heavily on discretionary signals about preliminary findings and research approaches. In contrast, later-stage collaborations remain largely unaffected. We also find that firms respond by reallocating collaborative search toward jurisdictions with weaker secrecy constraints. We test these predictions using the staggered adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine across U.S. states as a quasi-experimental source of variation in trade secret enforceability. Using data on drug-related collaborations in the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry (1980–2016), we find results consistent with our theory. Our findings reveal a trade-off in secrecy enforcement: policies that strengthen the protection of intangible assets can simultaneously constrain the collaborative processes underlying early-stage innovation.
October 7, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
October 7, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Charlotte Jacobs (Louisiana State University) - will present "Shaping an industry's value proposition as a strategic response to an unattainable substitution threshold"
Abstract: Technology substitution is a central process in the technology evolution literature, yet our understanding remains largely limited to incumbent firms’ responses and outcomes. For example, existing studies emphasize how incumbents may impede substitution by improving the performance of incumbent technologies such that the substitution threshold shifts upward and becomes unattainable for firms developing new technologies. While such strategic actions by incumbents obstruct the substitution process, surprisingly little is known about the strategic responses available to firms developing new technologies. We address this lacuna by theorizing shaping as a strategic response available to firms developing new technologies when facing an upward shift in the substitution threshold. Integrating research on technology substitution with the literature on endogenous shaping, we argue that when the substitution threshold becomes unattainable, these firms may attempt to shape the industry’s value proposition by altering consumers’ shared beliefs about the product’s utility and, consequently, about which technological attributes are valuable. This, in turn, redefines the substitution threshold itself, making it attainable again. We empirically examine our theorization through an in-depth study of the photovoltaic cell industry, combining qualitative and quantitative data. Our analysis reveals a strategic shift among startups following a sharp upward shift in the substitution threshold around 2010, as firms developing new technologies shifted their strategy toward shaping the industry’s value proposition. This study expands the repertoire of strategic responses available to new technology firms during substitution processes and advances research on endogenous shaping by identifying conditions under which shaping emerges and how the process unfolds.
October 21, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
October 21, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Patrick Llerena (University of Strasbourg) - will present "Schumpeterian entrepreneurship and ideation processes" (with Patrick Cohendet).
Abstract: This chapter aims to address the paradoxical portrayal of entrepreneurs in the Schumpeterian tradition. While entrepreneurs are portrayed as key players in economic development in Schumpeter's early works, they essentially disappear in neo-Schumpeterian literature, where their role is replaced by 'routines' as the primary operational component of organizations. This chapter re-establishes the entrepreneur as a producer of ideas, as well as an initiator and orchestrator of creative destruction, by reintegrating what we consider to be the primary “function of entrepreneurship”: generating and proposing new ideas and introducing novelty into the economic system. From this perspective, we argue that ideas, viewed primarily as processes, are the essence of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur’s role at the core of the 'entrepreneurial function', which orchestrates the ideation process by attracting, mobilizing and aligning allies around their vision. This entrepreneurial function takes different forms — from the 'heroic' entrepreneur of early capitalism, to a more 'depersonalized, routinised and automated' entity within large organizations, and, more recently, to an orchestrator within an innovative ecosystem.
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