September 9, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET

Madeleine Gates (Carnegie Mellon University) - will present "Failure as Fuel or Foil? Serial Entrepreneurs, External Changes, and the Challenge of Learning from Venture Failure"

This study integrates research on organizational learning and entrepreneurial strategy to examine how prior venture failure influences the actions and subsequent venture outcomes of serial entrepreneurs. We analyze the relationship between prior working and educational experiences, external changes made between ventures, and subsequent venture performance. Our analysis of 893 serial entrepreneurs indicates that failure increases the likelihood of external changes made between ventures, particularly in industry and location. External changes made by both failed and successful serial entrepreneurs are associated with worse subsequent venture survival outcomes, with negative effects intensifying with the magnitude of change. We discuss how these findings contribute to research on serial entrepreneurship and learning from failure.

September 23, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET

Innessa Colaiacovo (University of Oregon) - will present "Delegating to AI: Beliefs and the Organization of Work at New Ventures"

Abstract: When a technology emerges that may enhance productivity, managers must decide whether and how to apply it to their firms. We recruit founders of North American tech startups willing to share in-depth information about their experiences with generative AI and their perceptions of its impacts on their ability to scale. We first document substantial heterogeneity among the AI users in our sample: while founders estimate that in the absence of AI they would need 55% more employees, the median estimate is 17%, and nearly a third report no additional employees would be needed. Founders who formally integrate AI into their workflows estimate their required headcount increases would be nearly four times higher than those of informal users, and are more likely than informal users to report that AI has changed hiring and management. We then show that founders can have different preferences for delegating to AI, holding constant their beliefs about how well it performs a given task relative to humans. We randomly expose founders to optimistic or pessimistic information about AI performance and show that even when these task performance beliefs and delegation preferences update on average, substantial managerial heterogeneity persists in willingness to delegate to AI. These results suggest that, as with prior transformative technologies, the impact of AI on work and organizations is influenced not only by what the technology can do but also by what managers choose to do with it.

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"

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

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

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.

November 4, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET

Sung Ho Park (University of Oregon) - will present "When and How Do User Data Analytics Build New Venture Traction?"

Abstract: New ventures increasingly use user data analytics to build early traction across market spaces that vary in how much established knowledge exists about users. Yet it remains unclear whether analytics contribute more in conventional market spaces, where ventures can draw on established knowledge about users, or in unconventional ones, where such knowledge is sparse. Analytics may depend on existing market knowledge for accurate interpretation, or they may instead compensate for its absence by providing information about users that the broader market cannot. Examining 6,771 U.S. new ventures that engage users primarily through their websites, I find that while analytics adoption is associated with 25 to 50 percent higher web traction on average, this association more than doubles as the venture’s product market space becomes more unconventional. Exploratory analysis further suggests that this increase is larger when founders previously worked at analytics-intensive organizations, though not when they previously held analytics roles themselves. I also explore how ventures translate information from analytics into greater traction. Analytics adoption is associated with greater use of structured experimentation (i.e., A/B testing), which in turn helps explain higher traction. In contrast, I find no comparable evidence that traction gains arise from directly acting on interpretations of the data, such as by changing how ventures present their offerings or expanding their websites. Together, the findings suggest that analytics contribute most to traction where established market knowledge is sparse and that they do so in part by prompting ventures to test their understanding of users.

November 18, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET

Na Zhou (University of Bath) - title forthcoming

December 2, 2026: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET

Yuheng Ding (World Bank) - title forthcoming

January 27, 2027: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET

Honggi Lee (University of Massachussetts, Amherst) - will present "Technical Uncertainty, Speed, and Startup Exit" (with Divya Sebastian).

Abstract: Under what conditions do startups pursue a particular exit outcome: initial publicoffering (IPO), acquisition, or dissolution? We argue that the answer depends partlyon how quickly a startup resolves the technical uncertainty surrounding its inventions.A key insight is that public markets demand greater resolution of technical uncertaintythan acquirers, who can continue to resolve it after acquisition. Thus, given a fixed timehorizon that startups face, the payoff to speed is greater for IPO than for acquisition.Based on patent and exit data for 5,986 startups founded between 1990 and 2010, weshow that faster resolution of technical uncertainty raises the likelihood of every exitoutcome relative to non-exit, and this relationship is significantly stronger for IPO thanfor acquisition. Furthermore, the relationship is weaker for highly novel inventions andstronger for high-quality inventions, and is shaped by competition and markets fortechnology. Our findings indicate that an optimal exit strategy depends jointly on theresolution of technical uncertainty and on the internal and external factors that shapethe uncertainty and value of inventions.

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