Andy Wu is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the MBA and Executive Education programs. He conducts research on strategies for how technology entrepreneurs internally organize and externally mobilize resources to achieve scale for competitive advantage. He received the HBS Wyss Award, HBS Williams Award, Poets & Quants 40 Under 40, and Penn Prize in recognition of commitment and excellence in teaching and mentoring.
Professor Wu is a founder, director, investor, or advisor of several technology ventures. He holds several patents across rapid prototyping, medical imaging, robotics, and e-commerce.
He received a PhD and MS in Applied Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior fellow at the school’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management. While at Wharton, he received a Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. He earned his SB in economics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a Burchard Scholar.
Gregory, Henfridsson, Kaganer, and Kyriakou (2020) highlight the important role of data and AI as strategic resources that platforms may use to enhance user value. However, their article overlooks a significant conceptual distinction: the installed base of decentralized users who connect with a platform lie outside the boundaries of the platform-owning firm, whereas the accumulated data derived from that installed base exists internal to the boundaries of the firm and under firm control. Accounting for this distinction brings forth two key departures from their theory. First, the decentralized structure of a platform ecosystem makes value capture by the platform an essential consideration when analyzing the implications of data-driven learning for users. Because AI and data allow a platform to increase the share of value the platform owner captures from the users, the value perceived by users can often decline. Second, as an internal asset of the platform firm, data from users and complementors exhibits different dynamics compared with the dynamics that govern the installed base itself. As a result, the quantity and quality of the platform’s stock of data are only loosely coupled with the size of the platform’s installed base. We highlight the strategic implications of this distinction for a manager launching a new multi-sided platform.
Software platforms create value by cultivating an ecosystem of complementary products and services. Existing explanations for how a prospective complementor chooses platforms to join assume the complementor has rich information about the range of available platforms. However, complementors lack this information in many ecosystems, raising the question of how complementors learn about platforms in the first place. We investigate whether attending a temporary gathering—a hackathon—impacts the platform choices of software developers. Through a large-scale quantitative study of 1,302 developers and 167 hackathons, supported by qualitative research, we analyze the multiple channels—sponsorship, social learning, knowledge exchange, and social coordination—through which hackathons serve as a social forum for the diffusion of platform adoption among attendees.
Laura Huang, Priyanka D. Joshi, Cheryl J. Wakslak and Andy Wu
Female entrepreneurs have been found to face disadvantages as compared with male entrepreneurs, especially in acquiring the financial resources they need to sustain and grow their ventures. Across three studies, we examine how disparities in funding outcomes may be due to differences in how entrepreneurs communicate their ventures, whereby female entrepreneurs have a tendency to use more concrete language when describing their ventures than do their male counterparts. We find that use of abstract speech affects investors’ perceptions of which ventures are oriented toward long-term growth and scalability—which in turn, affects the likelihood that a venture will receive investment. We conclude with a discussion of the important role of communication style as a key mediating mechanism in influencing the cognitions of investors.
How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? While access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity of inventor-held knowledge within a given knowledge production team (“within-team knowledge diversity”). We introduce the concept of “across-team knowledge diversity,” which captures the distribution of inventor knowledge diversity across production teams, an overlooked dimension of a firm’s internal organization design. We study two contrasting forms of organizing the firm-level knowledge diversity environment in which a firm’s inventors are situated: “diffuse” (high within-team diversity and low across-team diversity) versus “concentrated” (low within-team diversity and high across-team diversity). Using panel data on new biotechnology ventures founded over a 21-year period and followed annually from inception, we find that concentrated structures are associated with higher firm-level innovation quality, and with more equal contributions from their teams (and the opposite for diffuse structures). Our empirical tests of the operative mechanisms point to the importance of within-team coordination costs in diffuse structures and across-team knowledge flows in concentrated knowledge structures. We end with a discussion of implications for future research on organizing for innovation.
Prior research on corporate headquarters (CHQ) characteristics identifies the impact of CHQ location and composition on the innovation outcomes of internal subsidiaries. However, given that external strategic alliances with high-tech entrepreneurial firms represent a key source of innovation for the corporation, corporations must also consider how their choices of CHQ location and composition affect the innovation outcomes of these partners. In a study of 36 incumbent pharmaceutical corporations in 377 strategic alliances with 143 VC-backed biotechnology startups, we leverage detailed hand-collected data on CHQ locations and functions to estimate the effect of the CHQ on the innovation performance of the corporations’ entrepreneurial alliance partners. We find that a 1000-km decrease in CHQ–partner distance leads to an increase of 28 forward citations for the alliance partner, i.e., a 1% decrease in the distance is associated with a 1.7% increase in innovation performance. We find that the co-located presence of the corporation’s R&D function at the CHQ attenuates the benefit of CHQ–partner proximity, particularly for alliances structured for horizontal collaboration at the same part of the value chain. This study contributes to the literatures on both CHQ design and technology alliances.
David R. Clough, Tommy Pan Fang, Balagopal Vissa and Andy Wu
The mobilization of resources is a central and defining feature of entrepreneurship. As the body of empirical research on entrepreneurial resource mobilization has grown, the literature has become increasingly fragmented. We review the literature on entrepreneurs’ mobilization of resources, spanning human, social, financial, and other forms of capital. We identify five critical issues that hold back progress in resource mobilization research. We then propose a path ahead for future research guided by two overarching goals. First, we advocate for a process perspective, focusing attention on how an individual actor’s disposition and situation shape her responses, how these responses interact with those of other actors, and how these individual and collective responses unfold over time to generate outcomes. Second, we call for stronger unification of theory within the entrepreneurial resource mobilization literature and across contiguous conversations in strategy and organization theory. Theoretical consilience will enable the accumulation of empirical research into a cohesive body of knowledge on entrepreneurial resource mobilization.
We study information aggregation in organizational decision-making for the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. We introduce a formal model of voting where agents face costly tacit information to improve their decision quality. Equilibrium outcomes suggest a theoretical tension for group decision-making between the benefits of information aggregation and a cost from the participation of uninformed agents, and this tension presents a boundary condition for when a group decision is superior to an individual decision. We test the implications of the model for a particular phenomenon in venture capital: private angel investments by the partners outside of their employer, which represent investments passed on by the employer. Venture capital partners, acting independently with their personal funds, make investments into younger firms with less educated and younger founding teams than their employing VC firms, but these investments perform financially similarly or better on some metrics even when controlling for investment size, stage, and industry. Geographic distance and technological inexperience by the VC increase the probability the investment is taken up by a partner and not the VC. This work contributes to an emerging stream of literature on information aggregation in organizations and the established literatures on resource allocation and incumbent spin-outs.
This chapter presents an overview of the literature on collaborative relationships between start-ups and incumbent firms, focusing on the implications of these relationships for start-up innovation and performance. Value creation in such relationships occurs when assets are exchanged by the parties involved: collaboration allows for passive knowledge flows and active knowledge creation; in addition, collaboration provides start-ups with access to the complementary assets of the incumbent. At the same time, value creation presents opportunities for value capture by either party, where value capture by the start-up is determined by their knowledge appropriation regime and social capital. The form in which the start-up appropriates value has implications for the assets that enable value creation. The framework for value creation and capture in bilateral start-up-incumbent collaborations extends to start-up-incumbent collaborations in a platform and ecosystem context where there are fruitful future research opportunities.
Laura Huang, Andy Wu, Min Ju Lee, Jiayi Bao, Marianne Hudson and Elaine Bolle
Early-stage financing from angel investors is critical to the success of high-growth startups. Recent estimates suggest that annual US angel investment activity may total as much as $24 billion each year, contributing to the growth and success of more than 64,000 startups, though the exact amount cannot be measured precisely. Indeed, many details about American angel investors has long eluded public knowledge. Put simply, there is a lack of knowledge on the profile and investment activities of US angel investors. The American Angel campaign was launched with the goal of shedding light on these questions by conducting the largest survey of business angels in the United States and putting faces on the modern American Angel.
This report, commissioned by the Angel Capital Association and the John Huston Fund for Angel Professionalism (raised by Rev1 Ventures), presents the results of the largest ever study of the profile, background, and investment behavior of angels in the US to date. The study comprises responses from 1,659 individual angels from throughout the country who responded to The American Angel survey.
Agile management practices from the software industry continue to transform the way organizations innovate across industries, yet they remain understudied in the organizations literature. We investigate the widespread Agile practice of iterative coordination: frequent meetings to coordinate individuals on innovation-oriented organizational goals. While the assumed purpose of iterative coordination is to generate innovation, there is limited empirical evidence as to whether this practice actually makes organizations more innovative. With the leading technology firm Google, we embed a field experiment within a hackathon software development competition to identify the effect of iterative coordination on innovation. We find that iterative coordination’s influence on innovation is mixed: while iteratively coordinating firms develop more valuable products, these products are simultaneously less novel. This counterintuitive result highlights a paradox at the heart of iterative coordination—whereas it intends to promote innovation, applying it yields less novelty, a necessary component of innovation. Furthermore, by tracking software code, we find that iteratively coordinating firms favor integration at the cost of specialization to create new knowledge. A follow-on laboratory study documents that increasing the frequency and goal orientation of iterative coordination meetings reinforces value and integration, while reducing novelty and specialization. This article makes three key contributions: refining theoretical understanding of the relationship between goal coordination and innovation; introducing empirical methodology for generating data with hackathons and software code version-tracking; and responding to calls from the literature to study new methods of organizing and whether they offer new insights on organizational innovation.
Gai, Shelby, J. Yo-Jud Cheng, and Andy Wu. "Intra-Organizational Brokerage Ability and Motivation: Inter-Board-Committee Coordination after Peer Restatement Events." Working Paper, May 2018.
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We document and analyze board committee structures utilizing a novel dataset containing full board committee membership for over 6,000 firms. Board committees provide benefits (specialization, efficiency, and accountability benefits) and costs (information segregation). Consistent with these benefits and costs, we find that committee activity increases with firm size, the proportion of outside directors, board tenure and size, and public information available to outside directors. Moreover, boards allocate directors in ways to alleviate information segregation through multi-committee directors. Specifically, multi-committee directors tend to serve on related committees and be outside directors with more expertise and experience. Also, busy directors are less likely to serve on multiple committees, possibly to avoid being overloaded.
Wu, Andy, Fujie Jin, and Lorin Hitt. "Social Is the New Financial: How Startups' Social Media Activities Influence Funding Outcomes." Working Paper, July 2015.
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Wu, Andy, David H. Hsu, and Vikas A. Aggarwal. "R&D Production Team Organization and Firm-Level Innovation." Working Paper, December 2015.
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In the midst of intensifying public and political attention towards the market power of big technology, Epic Games in 2020 challenged the status quo that has existed for years in the Apple iOS and Google Android mobile application marketplaces and payment systems. Apple and Google removed Fortnite from their app stores after its developer Epic Games intentionally introduced an unauthorized payment system. Epic Games sued Apple and Google, alleging their monopolistic control over the distribution of apps and the unreasonable commission rate for in-app purchases. Epic rallied other application developers and its 350 million Fortnite users in its fight.
The case begins with a brief history of Epic Games and some background on the antitrust issues around mobile platforms. Then, the case details the many actions taken by each side in the ensuing legal and public relations battle. The case provides context on future technologies, like cloud gaming, that will hinge on the issues already being fought over in 2020. The case challenges students to think about strategy for both the smaller complementor and the larger incumbent platform, and how to challenge and maintain market power respectively, in the context of looking forward to the future.
Scott Duke Kominers, Christopher Stanton, Andy Wu and George Gonzalez
In the first half of 2020, worldwide lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic brought explosive growth to the Zoom Video Communications platform, as people replaced in-person work and social events with videoconferencing. Months into the pandemic, CEO Eric Yuan reflects on his company's newly central role in society, and considers how to leverage the platform's broad adoption into sustainable future growth. The case also discusses Zoom’s internal culture—which prioritized employee and customer happiness—as well as how both the company and its customers faced the transition to remote work.
Founded in 2012, Skillz offered a platform for mobile app developers to monetize skill-based games via prized tournaments. Skillz had over 20,000 registered developers that had created thousands of Skillz-powered games played by over 30 million registered users (gamers). A successful gamer could make hundreds of thousands of dollars playing competitive games of skill. The company had a gross marketplace volume of almost $1 billion in 2019 and over 250 employees primarily in San Francisco, California and Portland, Oregon. CEO Andrew Paradise challenged his leadership team to explore options for accelerating growth.
Wu, Andy, David B. Yoffie, and George Gonzalez. "Skillz: Esports and Skill-Based Mobile Gaming." Harvard Business School Case 721-358, August 2020.
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Rembrand Koning, Andy Wu, Nataliya Langburd Wright and Tarun Khanna
The case explores the strategic decision of global non-profit startup accelerator MassChallenge on whether to pursue a for-profit spinoff, discussing: (1) the costs and benefits of this decision, (2) how best to manage the risks of the decision, and (3) alternative pathways to ensure business sustainability and success.
Koning, Rembrand, Andy Wu, Nataliya Langburd Wright, and Tarun Khanna. "MassChallenge." Harvard Business School Case 720-469, May 2020. (Revised July 2020.)
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With more than 72,000 employees and revenues approaching the $50B mark, Cisco Systems is one of the largest information technology and networking firms globally. As the company grew and expanded into different lines of businesses, Cisco consistently looked outwards for acquisition targets that could supplement its considerable size and reach. As a follow-up to its well-received $2.7B acquisition of SourceFire in 2013, which seamlessly integrated new cybersecurity offerings into the Security business group, Cisco began conversations with OpenDNS. OpenDNS was a fast-growing start-up with credibility in the cloud security space, but there were also concerns about how its Silicon Valley culture and flat organizational culture would mesh with Cisco’s more staid corporate environment. This case considers the dilemmas that two Cisco executives, Karen Ashley and Dianne Nakanishi, face as they make a final decision about whether and how to acquire and integrate OpenDNS.
Collis, David J., Andy Wu, and Rembrand Koning. "Walmart Inc. Takes on Amazon.com." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 720-437, February 2020.
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David B. Yoffie, Andy Wu and Allison M. Ciechanover
In fall 2017, HTC CEO and Chairperson Cher Wang was driving the company to focus on virtual reality (VR). HTC's first VR product, VIVE, released in spring 2016, was applauded for its superior immersive room-scale capabilities. However, early adoption of VR beyond gamers and technology enthusiasts was off to a slower start in general due to high cost, lack of quality content, and some user discomfort while using the technology. Wang endeavors to be the leading VR company, though competition from Sony, Facebook, and other technology leaders is mounting, and several, like HTC, are already pursuing second generation tetherless VR technology. As Wang seeks to develop the ecosystem by partnering with developers, creating a content platform, investing in VR startups, and launching VR arcades, she must decide the appropriate balance of fostering innovation in hardware, software and services, or both.
Yoffie, David B., Andy Wu, and Allison M. Ciechanover. "HTC and Virtual Reality." Harvard Business School Case 718-421, October 2017. (Revised August 2018.)
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Rory McDonald, Andy Wu, Emilie Billaud and Ryan Bayer
This note focuses on the development of the drone industry in recent years and provides insights on the drone technology, regulations, applications, market size, top players, and ecosystem. This note was written in conjunction with the case study “Parrot: Navigating the Nascent Drone Industry” (HBS No. 619-085).
McDonald, Rory, Andy Wu, Emilie Billaud, and Ryan Bayer. "Evolution of the Drone Industry." Harvard Business School Background Note 620-053, October 2019. (Revised January 2020.)
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Boxed.com (“Boxed”) is an ambitious e-commerce retailer start-up, founded by visionary CEO Chieh Huang in 2013. From starting in Huang’s garage in 2013, to winning Emerging E-Retailer of the Year in 2016, to having 4 operational distribution centers in 2018, Boxed used a variety of strategies in order to gain customers and grow its presence. This case explores the journey that the scrappy, new entrant navigated as it competed against large, goliath players in an already established retail and e-commerce industry.
Ashish Nanda, Eric Van den Steen, Andy Wu, Jeffrey Boyar and Bonnie Bennett Slater
Established in 2007, SoundCloud already boasted the second largest number of active music listeners among all streaming services and was recognized as the go-to platform for new artists by early 2014. Yet, its founders were questioning the robustness of the firm’s current focus on serving as a lab for emerging musical artists. They were wondering if the firm should instead enter the booming mainstream music streaming market.
Nanda, Ashish, Eric Van den Steen, Andy Wu, Jeffrey Boyar, and Bonnie Bennett Slater. "SoundCloud: Subscription Streaming?" Harvard Business School Case 719-430, January 2019. (Revised February 2020.)
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This note provides a framework for addressing the classic chicken-or-egg dilemma facing entrepreneurs launching nascent multi-sided platforms. There are several conditions that lead to a difficult chicken-or-egg problem: strong network effects, high multi-homing costs, limited differentiation, and high other barriers to entry. To overcome this challenge and create competitive advantage by reaching critical scale in network size, there are three categories of solutions to the problem: increasing value, decreasing cost, or subsidizing value for the platform participants. For a multi-sided platform, there are also dynamic considerations for addressing whether to stage one side of the platform first or build both simultaneously.
Boxed.com (“Boxed”) is an ambitious e-commerce retailer start-up, founded by visionary CEO Chieh Huang in 2013. From starting in Huang’s garage in 2013, to winning Emerging E-Retailer of the Year in 2016, to having 4 operational distribution centers in 2018, Boxed used a variety of strategies in order to gain customers and grow its presence. This case explores the journey that the scrappy, new entrant navigated as it competed against large, goliath players in an already established retail and e-commerce industry.
Epic Games entered a stagnant market with its PC-games digital storefront in 2018, in the context of incumbent competitors such as Steam, its meteoric rise via Fortnite, and imminent industry shifts in gaming distribution. On the surface, Epic Games Store’s competitive advantage was its revenue-sharing policy that was more generous to developers. Early successes revealed Epic Games’ potential as a new distribution platform. After serving two sides of a market exceptionally well – game developers through Unreal Engine and individual users through hit-games such as Fortnite – could Epic Games become a PC-games distribution platform in the rapidly-changing video games industry?
New approach to accelerating the development of innovation through corporate venturing by creating partnerships between startup venture and established corporations through the launch of the Global Sports Venture Studios created by R/GA Ventures and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Wu, Andy, and George Gonzalez. "Rise of the Drones: Identified Technologies." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 719-419, September 2018.
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With more than 72,000 employees and revenues approaching the $50B mark, Cisco Systems is one of the largest information technology and networking firms globally. As the company grew and expanded into different lines of businesses, Cisco consistently looked outwards for acquisition targets that could supplement its considerable size and reach. As a follow-up to its well-received $2.7B acquisition of SourceFire in 2013, which seamlessly integrated new cybersecurity offerings into the Security business group, Cisco began conversations with OpenDNS. OpenDNS was a fast-growing start-up with credibility in the cloud security space, but there were also concerns about how its Silicon Valley culture and flat organizational culture would mesh with Cisco’s more staid corporate environment. This case considers the dilemmas that two Cisco executives, Karen Ashley and Dianne Nakanishi, face as they make a final decision about whether and how to acquire and integrate OpenDNS.
The founder and CEO of Identified Technologies, a Pittsburgh-based drone software and services company, faces a dilemma when San Francisco–based DroneDeploy begins to disrupt the industry with its drone software platform. Identified Technologies needs to consider network effects, customer needs, and the overall state of the drone industry to determine its future path.
Cotopaxi, an innovative outdoor gear business targeting millennials, focuses on profit and social impact. This registered benefit corporation was formed by Davis Smith who coalesced his experiences as a Wharton MBA student along with professional knowledge from an unpaid internship in Peru and his previous e-commerce startups in the U.S. and Brazil. Cotopaxi’s social cause is fighting global poverty; their target is to donate 10% of their profits, but as a new capital-intensive business they give 2% of their revenue. Their income streams are mainly direct-to-consumer sales along with corporate sales and a special experience-based event—Questival. Their direct-to-consumer model lowers costs compared to competitors and allows Cotopaxi to offer lower prices, but they face a challenge in positioning their products as high quality.
The Digital Initiative is a cross-unit venture that unites scholars and practitioners to explore and impact the transformation of business in today’s digital, networked, and media-rich environment.
