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.
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.
Aggarwal, Vikas A., David H. Hsu, and Andy Wu. "Organizing Knowledge Production Teams within Firms for Innovation." Strategy Science (forthcoming).
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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.
Equity compensation is widely used for incentivizing skilled employees, particularly in new technology businesses. Traditional theories explaining why firms offer equity suggest that workers with higher rank should receive compensation packages more heavily weighted in equity. However, we observe the puzzle that many firms adopt an equality-in-equity strategy: they offer different cash salaries across all jobs but the same equity compensation. We propose a behavioral theory of domain-contingent inequality aversion to explain this finding: we argue that workers view salary and equity as two domains and are more inequality averse in the equity domain. Inequality in equity has a negative asymmetric effect on effort whereas the effect of inequality in salary can be positive. Our experimental findings are consistent with the existence of domain-contingent inequality aversion; we also find that inequality aversion in equity is more severe than in salary because of the perceived scarcity of equity.
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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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 June 2019.)
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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.
Wu, Andy, David R. Clough, and Sasha Kaletsky. "Nascent Platform Strategy: Overcoming the Chicken-or-Egg Dilemma." Harvard Business School Technical Note 719-507, May 2019.
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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.
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.
Wu, Andy, and George Gonzalez. "Rise of the Drones: Identified Technologies." Harvard Business School Case 718-482, February 2018. (Revised January 2019.)
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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.
