James Sappenfield is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School in the Technology and Operations Management (TOM) unit.
His research investigates the role of human capital as a driver of innovation processes and performance outcomes within organizations and firms. Specifically, the work explores the extent to which various human-capital related factors influence the direction of innovation within organizations as well as the implications of these relationships for managerial strategy. Examples of such factors include individual attainment of diverse knowledge-based expertise and skills or labor-related policy regulations.
In one stream of research, he focuses on how human capital attainment influences the evaluation of novel innovations within an organization, and the implications for recruitment of evaluators and design of evaluation processes. A difficult problem for managers of innovation and venture funding is determining which expert evaluators to recruit and understanding the biases of those evaluators. A first study (under revision) in this area finds that diverse knowledge expertise is associated with greater preferences for novelty among evaluators. Future projects in this stream will focus on the implications of knowledge diversity for evaluations by teams and panels.
A second stream of research focuses on the implications of access to diverse human capital for organization-level outcomes. A co-authored study (under preparation for submission) demonstrates that pro-business reforms to migration policy are exploited by multinational firms to engage in global collaborative patenting, a result in support of the knowledge-based theory of the firm. His job market research (solo-authored, analysis in-progress) explores the consequences for firms of the unexpected loss of innovator human capital due to the unexpected deaths of inventors. Preliminary results demonstrate that firms decrease invention and increase profits in the periods following human capital loss, suggesting that firms increase focus on operational efficiency (currently under exploration). Future projects in this stream will focus on, for example, the implications of bankruptcy policy for spawning entrepreneur-inventors.
Prior to attending HBS, he previously worked as a research assistant at MIT - Sloan School of Management, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and Boston University, and taught high school mathematics with Dallas ISD as a member of Teach For America. He holds a BA in Political Science and a BS in Business Administration, both from Boston University.
