Rembrand Koning is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Koning’s work explores how to discover, build, and test new products, ventures, and strategies. His work highlights how managerial and social biases distort this process, leading firms to systematically overlook promising ideas, people, and markets. Most recently, his research has focused on the forces that cause a firm's strategy to amplify race and gender biases and how to build strategies that instead reduce discrimination.
He has explored how to reduce bias in the process of strategic discovery, building, and testing through randomized controlled trials (RCTs), large-scale data analysis, and case studies. He has studied technology ventures, healthcare innovations, and SME performance across the globe, including in India, Togo, Columbia, Ghana, and the United States.
He teaches strategy and entrepreneurship to executives and MBA students. His work has appeared in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Research Policy, the Papers & Proceedings of the American Economic Association, the Journal of Organizational Design, and the American Sociological Review. It has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Vox, the New York Times, and Forbes. Professor Koning earned his Ph. D. at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received a Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. He graduated from the University of Chicago with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics.
Rembrand Koning is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Koning’s work explores how to discover, build, and test new products, ventures, and strategies. His work highlights how managerial and social biases distort this process, leading firms to systematically overlook promising ideas, people, and markets. Most recently, his research has focused on the forces that cause a firm's strategy to amplify race and gender biases and how to build strategies that instead reduce discrimination.
He has explored how to reduce bias in the process of strategic discovery, building, and testing through randomized controlled trials (RCTs), large-scale data analysis, and case studies. He has studied technology ventures, healthcare innovations, and SME performance across the globe, including in India, Togo, Columbia, Ghana, and the United States.
He teaches strategy and entrepreneurship to executives and MBA students. His work has appeared in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Research Policy, the Papers & Proceedings of the American Economic Association, the Journal of Organizational Design, and the American Sociological Review. It has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Vox, the New York Times, and Forbes. Professor Koning earned his Ph. D. at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received a Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. He graduated from the University of Chicago with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics.
We study whether increasing the share of female inventors leads to more biomedical inventions that focus on the needs of women. After accounting for detailed disease-technology, disease-year, and technology-year fixed effects, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of female inventors in a research area yields 1.2 percentage points more female-focused patents. Notably, this effect only holds for female-led invention teams. Areas with a greater share of female inventors in supporting roles do not produce more female-focused inventions. For gender to impact the direction of invention, it appears that women must occupy positions of power.
Can managers influence the formation of organizational networks? In this article, we evaluate the effect of joint tasks on the creation of network ties with data from a novel field experiment with 112 aspiring entrepreneurs. During the study, we randomized individuals to a set of 15 joint tasks varying in duration (week-long teams to 20-minute conversations). We then evaluated the impact of these interactions on the formation and structure of individuals’ social networks. We find strong evidence that these designed interactions led to the systematic creation of new friendship and advice relations as well as changes to the participants’ network centrality. Overall, network ties formed after a randomized interaction account for about one-third the individuals a participant knows, of their friendships, and their advice relations. Nevertheless, roughly 90% of randomized interactions never become social ties of friendship or advice. A key result from our research is that while joint tasks may serve to structure the social consideration set of possible connections, individual preferences strongly shape the structure of networks. As a consequence, there will likely remain a considerable unpredictability in the presence of specific ties even when they are designed.
When do conversations lead people to generate better ideas? We conducted a field experiment at a startup boot camp to evaluate the impact of informal conversations on the quality of product ideas generated by participants. Specifically, we examine how the personality of an innovator (openness to experience, capturing creativity) and the personalities of her randomly assigned conversational peers (extroversion, measuring willingness to share information) affects the innovator's ideas. We find that open innovators who spoke with extroverted peers generated significantly better ideas than others at the boot camp. However, closed individuals produced mediocre ideas regardless of the individuals they interviewed, suggesting limited benefits of conversations for these people. More surprisingly, open individuals, who are believed to be inherently creative, produced worse ideas after they spoke with introverted peers, suggesting individual creativity's dependence on external information. Our study demonstrates the importance of considering the traits of both innovators and their conversational peers in predicting who will generate the best ideas.
We conduct a field experiment at an entrepreneurship bootcamp to investigate whether interaction with proximate peers shapes a nascent startup team's performance. We find that teams whose members lack prior ties to others at the bootcamp experience peer effects that influence the quality of their product prototypes. A one-standard-deviation increase in the performance of proximate teams is related to a two-thirds standard-deviation improvement for a focal team. In contrast, we find that teams whose members have many prior ties interact less frequently with proximate peers, and thus their performance is unaffected by nearby teams. Our findings highlight how prior social connections, which are often a source of knowledge and influence, can limit new interactions and thus the ability of organizations to leverage peer effects to improve the performance of their members.
Aaron Chatterji, Solène 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.
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.
Research suggests that increased digitization of the labor market combined with the changing demand for skill has altered the job-search process. In this article, we argue that these changes have led to increased investments in firm-driven search for talent (or `outbound recruiting'). We investigate this question using two data sets, one new. First, we conduct a nationally representative survey of over 13,000 American workers. We find that nearly 18 percent of all employed workers in the US were hired into their present company by the outbound recruiting effort their employer, either directly or through labor market intermediaries such as a headhunter. The share of hiring driven by firm-driven search is greatest among higher-income workers, at 20.3 percent, and those with STEM and business degrees, at 20 percent. Moreover, considerable regional variation exists. For example, over a quarter of Silicon Valley workers are hired in this manner, whereas only 14.5% of those in Rochester are. Second, we complement our worker-level results by analyzing a large sample of job postings in the US economy over the past decade. We find that firms, especially those relying on high-skilled labor, are increasingly developing capabilities to better hunt for talent — hiring more recruiters with skill in online search. Given the growth of this practice, we discuss implications for research on firm strategy and labor markets.
Racial employment segregation between large workplaces in America has grown over the last generation. We know little about how changes in patterns of employment by economic sector have contributed to this growth, though. While there are many stylized narratives about how industrial change may have affected employment segregation, there are fewer testable predictions or ways to reconcile those narratives. We argue that Theil's information statistic provides a way to compare changes within and between industries or other sub-groups in a common framework. Changes in Theil's H can be decomposed into changes in relative size, relative diversity, and relative segregation, which are precisely the mechanisms on which most stylized narratives rely. We explain permutation-test methods for summarizing changes in these factors across six major economic sectors over time. We test these methods using four decades of longitudinal data on establishment workforce composition from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Recent field experiments demonstrate that advice, mentorship, and feedback from randomly assigned peers improve entrepreneurial performance. These results raise a natural question: what is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming these peer connections themselves? We argue that entrepreneurs may be under-networked because they lack the necessary social skills— the ability to communicate effectively and interact collaboratively with new acquaintances—that allow them to match efficiently with knowledgeable peers. We use a field experiment in the context of a business training program to test if a short social skills training module improves who the participants choose to learn from within the program. We find that entrepreneurs who were exposed to the social skills training formed 50% more relationships with peers. These relationships exhibited more matching based on managerial skill and were more ethnically diverse. Finally, the training also substantially increased entrepreneurs’ business performance. Our findings suggest that social skills help entrepreneurs build relationships that create value for both themselves and their peers.
Has the increase in female medical researchers led to more medical advances for women? In this paper, we investigate if the gender of inventors shapes their types of inventions. Using data on the universe of U.S. biomedical patents, we find that patents with women inventors are significantly more likely to focus on female diseases and conditions. Consistent with the idea of women researchers choosing to innovate for women, we find stronger effects when the lead inventor on the patent is a woman. Women-led research teams are 26% more likely to focus on female health outcomes. This link between the gender focus of the scientist and the type of invention, in combination with the rise of women inventors, appears to have influenced the direction of innovation over the last four decades. Our findings suggest that the demography of inventors matters not just for who invents but also for what is invented.
Recent work argues that experimentation is the appropriate framework for entrepreneurial strategy. We investigate this proposition by exploiting the time-varying adoption of A/B testing technology, which has drastically reduced the cost of experimentally testing business ideas. This paper provides the first evidence of how digital experimentation affects the performance of a large sample of high-technology startups using data that tracks their growth, technology use, and product launches. We find that, despite its prominence in the business press, relatively few firms have adopted A/B testing. However, among those that do, we find increased performance on several critical dimensions, including page views and new product features. Furthermore, A/B testing is positively related to tail outcomes, with younger ventures failing faster and older firms being more likely to scale. Firms with experienced managers also derive more benefits from A/B testing. Our results inform the emerging literature on entrepreneurial strategy and how digitization and data-driven decision-making are shaping strategy.
Does public ownership improve employment diversity? Organizational researchers theorize that increased transparency to regulators and the public should lead firms to conform to legal and social norms—but that social closure and decoupling should preserve the status quo. Empirical research has been difficult because we lack data on comparable private firms and because firms likely self-select into going public. We construct a new, nationally representative dataset that links firms' filings for initial public offerings to longitudinal data on employment composition from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We construct a set of comparable firms by looking at companies that filed and then withdrew a plan for an IPO. To account for selection bias in withdrawal and IPO success, we instrument the transition to public ownership using market returns in the book-building phase of the firms' IPO attempts. We find no evidence that moving from private to public ownership increases the representation of women or nonwhite workers or managers. We discuss the implications of this finding for our ability to generalize findings in organizational research.
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.
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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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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An examination of the strategic marketing challenges facing Thinx as it tries to grow in the face of menstruation taboos and competition from large incumbents.
Koning, Rembrand, Elie Ofek, and Nicole Keller. "Thinx, Inc. - Breaking Barriers in Feminine Care." Harvard Business School Case 720-443, March 2020.
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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.
