Professor Koning researches how firms and teams can learn from one another and through experiments to improve innovation, productivity, and growth. His work examines how firms decide what to do next and how social networks and business ecosystems shape the performance implications of these strategic choices. He is particularly interested in linking the experimental methods used in his research to policy and practice.

Professor Koning’s scholarship is located at the intersection of three primary areas of research: innovation, organizational theory, and strategy. His focus on the design of ecosystems draws on by a growing literature that examines the optimal design of online competitions and crowdsourcing platforms. His emphasis on the underlying processes that lead to ecosystem growth connects with debates about structure and agency in organizational theory. His primary concern with how to design networks that improve firm and ecosystem performance addresses central issues in strategy research.

In order to develop and test theories of network and ecosystem design, Professor Koning partnered with the India Software Product Roundtable and co-founded a three-week startup boot camp in Delhi. Using data from a field experiment embedded in the boot camp, he demonstrated that networks abundant in ideas cause early-stage teams to perform better in the face of strategic network formation. These findings provide evidence for the durability of knowledge-based network advantage and the importance of social interaction. His most recent research explores the social determinants of strategy formulation and strategic chance, the effects of spatial distance on knowledge spillovers, and how to identify and spread business ideas for growth.