Rembrand Koning is an assistant professor of business administration in the Strategy unit. His research examines how business ecosystems depend on the distribution of knowledge, technology, and people across firms. Central to his work is the use of field experiments and representative within-firm data to test how companies and entrepreneurs can best leverage diversity, digital tools, and social learning to increase growth and innovation. He teaches the Strategy course in the first-year MBA curriculum.
His work has been published in Organization Science and the American Sociological Review. Professor Koning earned his PhD in business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received a Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. Prior to his graduate studies, he was a research coordinator at Columbia Business School. He graduated from the University of Chicago with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics.
Research on geography and knowledge spillovers is premised on the proposition that proximity reduces the cost of search and coordination. Thus, learning from proximate parties is easier than from more distant ones. As a consequence, nearby individuals, teams, and firms share overlapping knowledge and correlated outcomes. In this paper we theorize that spatial spillovers fundamentally depend on the presence of existing relationships. Using multidimensional network formation data from the random placement of teams at a startup boot camp, we show that spatial spillovers decline if team members have existing ties within a particular social setting. For teams with preexisting ties within the boot camp, localized spillovers appear small or nonexistent. For teams without preexisting ties we find that outcomes improve if neighbors are high performing, but that outcomes worsen if neighboring teams are low performing. Our findings suggest that existing relationships do affect spillovers, primarily by capping downsides, but also by limiting the upsides of being near a high-performing team.
High-quality ideas and the individuals who generate them are critical to the success of organizations. In this article, we take a micro-network perspective on idea generation and incorporate personality theory into a multi-level model of information acquisition and idea generation. We posit that innovator and peer personality are critical factors conditioning who will generate high-quality ideas, and that our proposed mechanisms have implications at both individual and team levels. Using data from a randomized field experiment embedded in a startup boot camp for early stage entrepreneurs, our findings show that innovators who are more open to experience do generate better ideas, but only when they converse with extroverted peers. Further, we find that teams populated with such openness-extroversion dyads perform substantially better—having both a higher pool of novel information and better recombinative capability with the team. We discuss implications for future research on the individual and social determinants of innovation.
Do networks plentiful in ideas provide early stage startups with performance advantages? On the one hand, network positions that provide access to a multitude of ideas are thought to increase team performance. On the other hand, research on network formation argues that such positional advantages should be fleeting as entrepreneurs strategically compete over the most valuable network positions. To investigate these competing views, I embed a field experiment in a startup bootcamp to test if networks that are plentiful in ideas lead to sustainable network- based performance advantages. Leveraging data on each participant’s creative potential, I use peer randomizations and detailed data on network formation to show that ties to more creative individuals improve team performance. Despite the performance benefits of such connections, I find little evidence that entrepreneurs strategically connect to others who have greater creative potential. Instead, entrepreneurs seek feedback from others on dimensions that are more socially salient and verifiable. Beyond providing causal evidence for the durability of network-based performance advantages, these findings provide micro-level support to the importance of knowledge spillovers within bootcamps, accelerators, and startup ecosystems more generally.
Aaron Chatterji, Solene Delecourt, Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
Why do some entrepreneurs thrive while others fail? We explore whether the advice entrepreneurs receive about managing their employees influences their startup's performance. We conducted a randomized field experiment in India with 100 high-growth technology firms whose founders received in-person advice from other entrepreneurs who varied in their managerial style. We find that entrepreneurs who received advice from peers with a formal approach to managing people—instituting regular meetings, setting goals consistently, and providing frequent feedback to employees—grew 28% larger and were 10 percentage points less likely to fail than those who got advice from peers with an informal approach to managing people, two years after our intervention. Entrepreneurs with MBAs or accelerator experience did not respond to this intervention, suggesting that formal training can limit the spread of peer advice.
Aaron Chatterji, Solene Delecourt, Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
Why do some entrepreneurs thrive while others fail? We explore whether the advice entrepreneurs receive about people management influences their firm’s performance. We conducted a randomized field experiment in India with 100 high-growth technology firms whose founders received in-person advice from other entrepreneurs who varied in their managerial style. We find that entrepreneurs who received advice from peers with an active approach to managing people—instituting regular meetings, setting goals consistently, and providing frequent feedback to employees—grew 28% larger and were 10 percentage points less likely to fail than those who got advice from peers with a passive people-management approach two years after our intervention. Entrepreneurs with MBAs or accelerator experience did not respond to this intervention, suggesting that formal training can limit the spread of peer advice.
Racial segregation between American workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase has happened alongside the declines in within-establishment occupational segregation on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of longitudinal data on the racial employment composition of every large private-sector workplace in the United States to calculate between-establishment and within-establishment trends in racial employment segregation over time. We demonstrate that the return of racial establishment segregation owes little to within-establishment processes but rather stems from differences in the turnover rates of more- and less-homogeneous workplaces. Present research on employment segregation focuses intently on within-firm processes. By doing so, we may be overstating what progress has been made on employment integration and ignoring other avenues of intervention that may give greater leverage for further integrating firms.
Prior work has considered the properties of individual jobs that make them more or less likely to survive in organizations. Yet little research examines how a job’s position within a larger job structure affects its life chances and thus the evolution of the larger job structure over time. In this article, we explore the impact of technical interdependence on the dynamics of job structures. We argue that jobs that are more enmeshed in a job structure through these interdependencies are more likely to survive. We test our theory on a quarter century of personnel and job description data for the nonacademic staff of one of America’s largest public universities. Our results provide support for our key hypotheses: jobs that are more enmeshed in clusters of technical interdependence are less likely to die. At the same time, being part of such a cluster means that a job is more vulnerable if its neighbors disappear. And the “protection” of technical interdependence is contingent: it does not hold in the face of strategic change or other organizational restructurings. We offer implications of our analyses for research in organizational performance, careers, and labor markets.
This case describes how Google designed and launched an internal matching market to assign individual workers with projects and managers. The case evaluates how marketplace design considerations—and several alternative staffing models—could affect the company’s goals and workers’ well-being. It discusses the details of implementation as well as the intended (and unintended) consequences of the internal match system. The case concludes with a debate about how the Chameleon marketplace could expand to include more Googlers and illustrates what to consider when thinking about launching new matching markets in organizations.
