I am an Assistant Professor in Strategy at HEC Paris. I work on innovation, non-market strategy, and policy. My work examines the co-creation of policy and firm strategy. In my doctoral thesis, I examined how firms and the courts jointly shape patent policy and how in turn those policies shape firms’ innovative activities. My work is supported by a US National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant (Project ID: 1759991) to the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program and the HEC Foundation (Project ID: 9B82F1905+).

I received my doctoral degree at Georgia Tech in 2019. Prior to joining academia, I worked in management consulting, telecom and media regulation and investment banking. I completed an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, and graduate degrees in I.T. engineering and in applied economics.

Research

Research interests: Innovation Management & Strategy, Nonmarket Strategy, Intellectual Property, Science & Technology Policy

Under review

Sharpen your Sword for Litigation: Incumbent Strategic Reaction to the Threat of Entry (with Annamaria Conti and Leonardo Ortega). - Accepted at Management Science

Available here. 

Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings 2022

While patents have been shown to play a role as barriers to entry, they also reveal information about incumbent strategies and risk being invalidated. We examine the tradeoff incumbents face between using their patents ex-ante as entry deterrents or ex-post once competitors have revealed their moves. Leveraging the unique characteristics of the pharmaceutical sector, where it is possible to observe exactly when a competitor entry threat materializes, and exploiting exogenous variation in that timing, we show that incumbents intentionally fragment and delay the full disclosure of their intellectual property rights through continuation patents. They disproportionately reveal continuation patents after a competitor entry threat becomes concrete, tailoring their response to the threat they have received and successfully delaying competitor entry through litigation. The detected incumbents’ reaction is stronger when their attacked drugs are valuable and when the patents listed at the FDA approval of a drug are relatively narrow in scope.

Dependence and Credibility in Corporate Political Activity at the U.S. Supreme Court (with John P. Walsh) - Reject&Resubmit at Administrative Science Quarterly

This paper explores the effects of firms’ dependence on a policy on policymakers’ willingness to use the information firms provide. We theorize that policymakers, like U.S. Supreme Court Justices, perceive policy dependence as a source of bias. We focus on corporate political activity in the form of voluntary filings of amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. Our results are based on the information in both the amicus briefs and in the Supreme Court opinions in patent-related cases between 2000 and 2015. While we find weak evidence that firms’ dependence on a policy may discredit them directly, we find evidence of indirect negative effects of firms’ dependence on their influence. Our results reveal that using scientific information, which is socially constructed as unbiased, increases the number of arguments in common between amicus briefs submitted by a firm and included in the Court’s opinion, and firms’ dependence negatively moderates this effect. The effects are driven by firms that have lawyers with past common affiliations with the Justices. We highlight the role of perception of bias to uncover a mechanism by which firms’ dependence, which is the key determinant of engagement in political activity, is detrimental to the success of those actions.

The Heterogeneous Response to Weaker Excludability for Patented Technology 

Finalist for the Kauffman Prize (REER Conference Best Student Paper Award), 2018 

Best Paper for an Emerging Scholar Award at the European Policy for Intellectual Property 2017 conference 

Revise&Resubmit at the Strategic Management Journal

This paper examines how firm innovation strategies vary in response to changes in the level of intellectual property rights protection. Exploiting a policy change associated with the 2006 US Supreme Court ruling eBay vs. MercExchange which eliminated automatic injunctions in the case of infringed patents, I examine the exogenous reaction of a unique sample of French innovative firms. I find that these firms’ propensity to patent in the US decreased by 2.5% after the 2006 change. However, their R&D investment increased by 2.6%. Additionally, I find that firms operating in industry sectors with high levels of intellectual property ownership fragmentation vary the composition of their patent portfolio by decreasing the proportion of low-quality patents. Conversely, firms in sectors with low levels of fragmentation produce a relatively larger share of high-quality patents and engage in new technological areas. I interpret these findings as evidence that the policy shock induced firms with a high ex ante likelihood of being negatively affected by the shock to increase their R&D effort, producing innovations of higher quality and exploring new technological areas.

Innovation in Publicly Backed Small Firms: The Mediating Role of Attention Allocated to External Knowledge Sources (with John P. Walsh)

We examine to what extent the effect of public funding on innovation is explained by recipient firms allocating attention to a broader set of external sources of knowledge. We focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs). They are a common target of public sponsorship and are also likely to need external knowledge because of their resource constraints. Using 3,140 Korean SMEs, we find a positive effect of public funding on innovation, which is mediated by an increase in search breadth. The mediation explains 43% of the total effect of public funding on innovation performance. These results suggest that a significant share of the relationship between financial resources obtained from public sponsorship and firm innovation is explained by a change in the allocation of managerial attention.

Teaching

Strategy Core, Spring 2019 - 

Nonmarket Strategy, doctoral course (co-teaching), 2022-2023

Guest lecture on Industry Analysis, Executive MBA, Fall 2021

Competitive Strategy and Firm Heterogeneity, doctoral course (co-teaching), Spring 2022

Service

Advisory Editor for Research Policy, 2022 – Present 

Ad hoc reviewer for Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy

Representative-at-large for the Competitive Strategy Interest group at the Strategic Management Society, 2022 – Present 

Awards & Grants

Best Dissertation Award, Academy of Management, TIM Division, 2020

ECODEC grant (Area 5: New Challenges for New Data), 2020

Best Reviewer Award, Academy of Management, TIM Division, 2019

William H Read Award, Georgia Tech, 2018-2019

Finalist for the Kaufman Best Student Paper Award (REER Conference), 2018

NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant (#1759991) to the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program (co-PI, PI: John P. Walsh), 2017-2018

Best Reviewer Award, Academy of Management, TIM Division, 2018

Certificate of Outstanding Contribution in Reviewing awarded by Research Policy, 2017

Outstanding doctoral student, School of Public Policy, Georgia Tech, 2017-2018

Best Paper for an Emerging Scholar Award at the European Policy for Intellectual Property 2017 conference

Best Presentation Award at the Technology Management and Policy Graduate Consortium, 2017

Best Presentation Award at the Doctoral Workshop of the European Policy for Intellectual Property 2016 conference

Contact

sung@hec.fr 

+33 (0) 1 39 67 9813  

HEC Paris 

1 rue de la Liberation, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas, France