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Maria P. Roche

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Maria Roche is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches Strategy in the MBA required curriculum. Her research focuses on the production and diffusion of knowledge, which she examines in various contexts including cities, co-working spaces, and universities. Her work, forthcoming at The Review of Economics and Statistics, Organization Science and Research Policy, has been featured in The Atlantic.

Professor Roche earned her PhD in Management (Strategy and Innovation) at the Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology, where she was a recipient of a NSF Science of Science and Innovation Policy Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. She earned an MS in Business Administration and a BA in International Cultural and Business Studies at the University of Passau, Germany. A native of Canada and Germany, Professor Roche has lived and worked in five countries gathering professional experience in various industries such as venture capital and film.

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Journal Articles

  1. Article | Review of Economics and Statistics | Forthcoming

    Taking Innovation to the Streets: Micro-geography, Physical Structure and Innovation

    Maria P. Roche

    In this paper, we analyze how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange. We exploit a novel data set covering all Census Block Groups in the contiguous United States with information on innovation outcomes, street infrastructure, as well as population and workforce characteristics. To deal with concerns of omitted variable bias, we apply commuting zone fixed effects and construct instruments based on historic city planning. The results suggest that variation in street network density may explain regional innovation differentials beyond the traditional location externalities found in the literature.

    Citation:

    Roche, Maria P. "Taking Innovation to the Streets: Micro-geography, Physical Structure and Innovation." Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming).  View Details
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  2. Other Unpublished Work | 2018

    Different Founders, Different Firms: A Comparative Analysis of Academic and Non-academic Startups

    Maria P. Roche, Annamaria Conti and Frank T. Rothaermel

    What role do differences in founders' occupational backgrounds play in new venture performance? Analyzing a novel dataset of 2998 founders creating 1723 innovative startups in biomedicine, we find that the likelihood and hazard of achieving a liquidity event are lower for academic than for non-academic startups. However, academic startups produce as many patents and receive as much funding as non-academic startups, suggesting that the observed differences in achieving a liquidity event are not driven by differential invention performance. Exploiting heterogeneity among academic startups, we also find that differences between professor and student startups do not explain academic startups' comparatively low performance on the exit market vis-à-vis nonacademic startups. Yet, startups founded by superstar professors perform similarly to non-academic startups on the exit market for new ventures, and better than startups founded by highly productive professors but without external certification.

    Keywords: founders; Business Startups; Demographics; Performance; Analysis;

    Citation:

    Roche, Maria P., Annamaria Conti, and Frank T. Rothaermel. "Different Founders, Different Firms: A Comparative Analysis of Academic and Non-academic Startups." (Forthcoming at Research Policy.)  View Details
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  3. Other Unpublished Work | 2018

    Lowering the Bar? External Conditions, Opportunity Costs, and High-Tech Startup Outcomes

    Annamaria Conti and Maria P. Roche

    We assess the heterogeneous impact of economic downturns on individuals’ decisions to bring high-technology ideas to the market in the form of new ventures. We thereby examine how worsening labor market conditions influence individuals’ opportunity costs of starting new ventures, the resulting composition of the entrepreneurial pool, and startup performance outcomes. Using a rich dataset of startup founders in the biotechnology and medical device sectors, we find that an increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a substantial rise in the share of entrepreneurs who are most sensitive to worsening labor market conditions. Additionally, we find that startups founded by these entrepreneurs display lower financial and innovative performance than startups founded by entrepreneurs who are relatively insensitive to business cycles. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that individuals’ heterogeneous response to worsening labor market conditions is a relevant factor in explaining the negative relationship between unemployment and startup performance outcomes.

    Keywords: necessity entrepreneurship; economic conditions; recessions; high-tech startups; Entrepreneurship; Economy; Business Startups; Technology; Performance;

    Citation:

    Conti, Annamaria, and Maria P. Roche. "Lowering the Bar? External Conditions, Opportunity Costs, and High-Tech Startup Outcomes." (Conditionally accepted at Organization Science.)  View Details
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