Innovation Management & Strategy, Nonmarket Strategy, Intellectual Property, Science & Technology Policy
Conti, A., Ortega, L., & Sung, E. (2025). Sharpen your sword for litigation: incumbent strategic reaction to the threat of entry. Management Science, 71(1), 803-824.
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 trade-off 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, in which 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 Food and Drug Administration approval of a drug are relatively narrow in scope.
National Constraints in the Innovation Process: Alliances for New Product Development in Aircraft Manufacturing - with Joao Albino-Pimentel, Pierre Dussauge, Louis Mulotte, and Steve Tallman (Forthcoming at Research Policy)
We investigate how the global market integration of a firm’s home country and the security salience of specific projects shape firms’ propensity to form alliances during new product development. The Resource-Based View suggests that the development of technologically complex products often requires unique resources that may be unavailable domestically, driving firms to seek international partnerships. However, we propose that, in high-technology industries where national interests are at stake, alliances in the product development phase face unique constraints. They involve partner firms committing non-redeployable resources to a specific, well-defined product and to new assets and processes to manufacture it. Moreover, because this phase determines which specific features become available for commercial or military deployment, these alliances attract heightened scrutiny from governments, especially in security-sensitive projects. We thus propose that the well-established relationship between product complexity and alliance formation is negatively moderated by two major geopolitical factors: (i) the global market integration of the firm’s home country and (ii) the national security salience of the project. Both conditions enable or enhance alternative pathways to resource access that reduce dependence on alliances. Using data on new aircraft development projects, we find support for our predictions. Our findings contribute to the understanding of how home-country global market integration and project national security salience shape firms’ innovation strategies by affecting alliance formation decisions during product development.
Corporate Political Activity at the U.S. Supreme Court - with John P. Walsh and Yasir Dewan (3rd round Revise and Resubmit at Administrative Science Quarterly)
What enables organizations to obtain favorable policy outcomes through informational lobbying? We develop a theory positing that organizations are more likely to succeed when they address both the uncertainty policymakers face about the relevant facts and the ambiguity they face in choosing among competing policy interpretations. Our theory identifies credible information as addressing uncertainty by giving policymakers reason to trust an organization’s empirical claims, and coalition support as addressing ambiguity by giving policymakers reason to view a given interpretation as reflecting broad interests. Our theory therefore predicts that the influence of credible information increases with coalition size and diversity. Focusing on policy-relevant science as credible information in the context of judicial lobbying, we test these predictions using original data on amicus briefs filed in patent cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. We find that policy-relevant science is not, by itself, associated with greater lobbying success. The association emerges when policy-relevant science is advanced by larger coalitions, by more diverse coalitions, and most strongly by large and diverse coalitions. Our theory and findings extend research on informational lobbying by introducing ambiguity as a distinct obstacle to influence and by identifying coalition formation as the mechanism through which organizations can address ambiguity.
Lobbying the Courts - with Yasir Dewan and Jiao Luo (1st round Revise and Resubmit at the Strategic Management Journal)
Courts are a policymaking arena, yet nonmarket strategy research has concentrated on legislatures and agencies, leaving lobbying directed at courts largely unexamined. We study such lobbying in U.S. Supreme Court patent cases and how it relates to firms' congressional lobbying on patent policy. Treating the filing of amicus curiae briefs as a form of informational lobbying, we ask two questions: which firms lobby the Court, and how the Court's decisions reshape firms' lobbying in Congress. Using data on the 31 patent-related Supreme Court cases decided between 2000 and 2015, matched to firms' patenting and lobbying records, we measure each firm's stake in a case by its technological proximity to the case's participants, fixed as of the certiorari grant so that it reflects a firm's prior position rather than any reaction to the case. We find that firms technologically close to a case's litigants are more likely to file briefs, and that they file on the side of the litigant they cite—most strongly on the petitioner side. Court and congressional lobbying, however, are largely separate: filing a brief does not predict later lobbying in Congress. Instead, the congressional response comes from bystanders—firms that neither litigated nor filed but are technologically linked to the winning side's amici or the losing side's litigants—who step up their lobbying after the decision. Our findings establish the judiciary as a genuine site of corporate political action, show how firms shift effort across venues in response to decisions they did not initiate, and caution research that treats Supreme Court patent rulings as exogenous shocks.
Lobbying Meetings and Contract Winners: Evidence from the European Union - with Nel Dutt, Miguel Espinosa, Andrea Fosfuri, Ruyue Li, and Johan Rath (Reject and Resubmit at the Strategic Management Journal)
Firms often lobby across multiple policymaking institutions to hedge against the uncertainty of political payoffs. Prior work assumes that this breadth improves outcomes simply because targeting more venues raises the odds of success. We argue instead that breadth matters because it reflects a political capability—the ability to understand how policy is made, spot which institution matters most at a given moment, and shift lobbying effort there. The returns to breadth are therefore not automatic; they depend on reallocation. We test this using the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted the EU's deliberative stage (the European Parliament) far more than its agenda-setting stage (the European Commission), raising the value of Commission access. Using original data on firms' lobbying meetings and EU procurement records, we find that breadth did not predict procurement success before the pandemic. Its value appeared only afterward, through reallocation: firms with greater pre-pandemic breadth were the ones that shifted lobbying toward the Commission, gained more access, and won more contracts—outcompeting firms already concentrated there. Our findings recast lobbying breadth not as an inherently valuable strategy but as a sign of firms' political capabilities, showing that its returns depend on where and when firms engage as conditions change.
The Heterogeneous Response to Weaker Excludability for Patented Technology (working paper)
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
Innovation in Publicly Backed Small Firms and External Knowledge Sources - with John P. Walsh (working paper)
As member of a consortium (peer-reviewed):
Fišar, M., Greiner, B., Huber, C., Katok, E., Ozkes, A. I., & Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration. (2024). Reproducibility in Management Science. Management Science, 70(3), 1343-1356. (open access, online appendix).
White paper for public dissemination:
Dutt, Nilanjana and Espinosa, Miguel and Li, Ruyue and Rath, Johan and Sung, Elie, Lobbying in the EU (May 19, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5260257
Advisory Editor for Research Policy, 2022 – Present
Ad hoc reviewer for Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy
Representative-at-large for the TIM division at the Academy of Management, 2026 and 2027 (current)
Representative-at-large for the Entrepreneurship & Strategy Interest group at the Strategic Management Society, 2025 and 2026 (current)
Representative-at-large for the Competitive Strategy Interest group at the Strategic Management Society, 2022 and 2024
Best Dissertation Award, Academy of Management, Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) Division, 2020. Winner.
Best Reviewer Award, Academy of Management, TIM Division, 2019
William H Read Award, Georgia Tech, 2018-2019
Kaufman Best Student Paper Award (REER Conference), 2018. Finalist.
Best Reviewer Award, Academy of Management, TIM Division, 2018
Outstanding doctoral student, School of Public Policy, Georgia Tech, 2017-2018. Winner.
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 Paper for an Emerging Scholar Award at the European Policy for Intellectual Property 2017 conference. Winner.
Best Presentation Award at the Technology Management and Policy Graduate Consortium, 2017. Winner.
Best Presentation Award at the Doctoral Workshop of the European Policy for Intellectual Property 2016 conference. Winner.