About Me

My name is Qingqing Chen, a job market candidate at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. My research interests lie in the intersection of strategy, technology management, and international business.

Specifically, I seek to understand how internal mechanisms and external institutional environments shape firms' decisions and outcomes of innovation collaboration. With increasing specialization and modularization, cooperation across organizational boundaries has become an ever more important strategic tool whereby firms enhance innovation capabilities, access complementary technologies, and jointly impact technology evolution. In examining these phenomena, I study both micro (e.g., inventor-team composition) and macro (e.g., inter-organizational network, innovation ecosystem, institutional environment) drivers behind firms' collaborative decisions and innovation performance. My ongoing projects tackle two questions: first, how can firms leverage inter-firm collaboration to acquire innovation capabilities and impact technology evolution? Second, how do collaboration patterns and outcomes evolve with the changing institutional environment?

Before my Ph.D. at Wharton, I completed my B.A. in Economics, B.S. in Statistics, and MSc in Economics at Peking University. After I joined Wharton's Business Economics and Public Policy Department, I found my real passion lies in understanding firms' strategic decisions in managerial practices, especially their trade-offs in innovation and technology development. Thanks to Wharton's full support for doctoral students' research choices and academic development, I finished the core courses in both Economics and Management and chose Strategic Management as my primary research area. I appreciate my adviser David Hsu and other faculty members on my committee, Lori Rosenkopf, Witold Henisz and Gilles Duranton, for their guidance in my academic transmission. Solid training in the two disciplines prepares me for conducting robust studies in Strategy.

I love cooking and watching movie in my spare time. Following is a quote from my favorite movie, Ratatouille, which also encourages my academic exploration "You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits... Your only limit is your soul."

Contact: qingch@wharton.upenn.edu