Overview

How can technology entrepreneurs build competitive advantage from the ground up? Professor Andy Wu conducts scholarly research and develops course materials that document how technology entrepreneurs can (1) organize for innovation to create new market opportunities and (2) mobilize resources to achieve scale. These two considerations distinguish entrepreneurial strategy from incumbent strategy in technology. To intimately understand the practice and consequences of these actions for technology entrepreneurs, Professor Wu uses a variety of empirical methods: archival data, field experiments, laboratory experiments, and qualitative interviews.

Entrepreneurs have a unique organizational ability to create value through innovation because they lack scale, but they need to resort to unconventional methods to persuade investors and complementors to join and enable them to build scale and capture that value. First, entrepreneurial firms have a unique ability to innovate despite, and often because of, their lack of scale: they are able to reconfigure their organizations on the dimensions of structure, time, and space—in short, to innovate rapidly and efficiently. For instance, flat entrepreneurial organizations can easily alter how they coordinate and thus swap between generating usefulness and novelty, the two necessary components of innovation. Second, technology entrepreneurs face a unique challenge in acquiring external resources needed to scale. Entrepreneurs without scale can communicate the potential of scale to investors and complementors, and they can select for parties that favorably perceive that potential. These two streams reflect the lifecycle of strategies for the technology entrepreneur: first, how the very nascent entrepreneur can innovate without scale; second, how the entrepreneur can get the resources to build a scale advantage around that innovation.

Professor Wu’s interest in this topic stems from his experience as an entrepreneur and inventor predating my own academic career. His family immigrated to the United States for the dynamism around technology and entrepreneurship, representing what the best of the American Dream. Since his youth, he helped his family in software ventures and even restaurants. On his own, he launched a (still growing) venture to bring cutting-edge drone and cloud-based big data technology to the industrial sector.