Rembrand M. Koning - Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School

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Rembrand M. Koning

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Strategy
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Rembrand Koning is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. His research examines matching and selection frictions in firm growth and strategy, with an aim to help entrepreneurs and executives improve their odds of selecting scalable ideas, promising markets, and high-potential talent.  

His current research projects build on randomized controlled trials and detailed observational datasets from across the globe. Some of this work explores how experimentation, A/B testing, & agile strategies improve the selection of high-growth ideas and how such experiments are sometimes biased, pushing entrepreneurs away from promising opportunities. Other work focuses on how better communication practices enable entrepreneurs to match with more useful advisors and advice.  

He is especially interested in how race and gender interact with the allocation of talent and the selection of ideas in new and established firms. He is exploring how the tightening boundary of the firm has resulted in increased workplace racial segregation in the United States and so may have contributed to mismatches between talent and jobs. His most recent work on this topic explores product-market bias, the extent to which markets select male as against female-focused inventions, and explores how increases in female representation could shift markets to better benefit women.

He teaches strategy and entrepreneurship to executives and MBA students. His work has appeared in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Research Policy, 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. in business 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. 

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Journal Articles

  1. Article | Journal of Organization Design

    Designing Social Networks: Joint Tasks and the Formation of Network Ties

    Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning

    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.

    Keywords: accelerators; entrepreneur; Organizations; Networks; Design; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information Technology Industry; India;

    Citation:

    Hasan, Sharique, and Rembrand Koning. "Designing Social Networks: Joint Tasks and the Formation of Network Ties." Art. 4. Journal of Organization Design 9, no. 1 (2020).  View Details
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  2. Article | Research Policy

    Conversations and Idea Generation: Evidence from a Field Experiment

    Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning

    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.

    Keywords: peer effects; field experiment; Interpersonal Communication; Creativity; Personal Characteristics; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention;

    Citation:

    Hasan, Sharique, and Rembrand Koning. "Conversations and Idea Generation: Evidence from a Field Experiment." Art. 103811. Research Policy 48, no. 9 (November 2019).  View Details
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  3. Article | Strategic Management Journal

    Prior Ties and the Limits of Peer Effects on Startup Team Performance

    Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning

    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.

    Keywords: field experiment; peer effects; office space; Knowledge Spillovers; accelerators; Entrepreneurship; Knowledge Sharing; Performance; Technology Industry; India;

    Citation:

    Hasan, Sharique, and Rembrand Koning. "Prior Ties and the Limits of Peer Effects on Startup Team Performance." Strategic Management Journal 40, no. 9 (September 2019): 1394–1416.  View Details
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  4. Article | Strategic Management Journal

    When Does Advice Impact Startup Performance?

    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.

    Keywords: entrepreneurial management; field experiment; peer effects; entrepreneurial ecosystems; advice; Management Style; Management Practices and Processes; Knowledge Dissemination; Entrepreneurship; Performance; India;

    Citation:

    Chatterji, Aaron, Solène Delecourt, Sharique Hasan, and Rembrand Koning. "When Does Advice Impact Startup Performance?" Strategic Management Journal 40, no. 3 (March 2019): 331–356.  View Details
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  5. Article | American Sociological Review

    Firm Turnover and the Return of Racial Establishment Segregation

    John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning

    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.

    Keywords: diversity; firm entry; stratification; segregration; entrepreneurship; Business Ventures; Employees; Diversity; Race; Segmentation; United States;

    Citation:

    Ferguson, John-Paul, and Rembrand Koning. "Firm Turnover and the Return of Racial Establishment Segregation." American Sociological Review 83, no. 3 (June 2018): 445–474.  View Details
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  6. Article | Organization Science

    The Lives and Deaths of Jobs: Technical Interdependence and Survival in a Job Structure

    Sharique Hasan, John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning

    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.

    Keywords: Jobs; organizational structure; natural language processing; Jobs and Positions; Organizational Structure;

    Citation:

    Hasan, Sharique, John-Paul Ferguson, and Rembrand Koning. "The Lives and Deaths of Jobs: Technical Interdependence and Survival in a Job Structure." Organization Science 26, no. 6 (November–December 2015): 1665–1681.  View Details
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Working Papers

  1. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

    Industrial Change, the Boundary of the Firm, and Racial Employment Segregation

    John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning

    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.

    Keywords: workplace segregation; firm boundaries; Organizations; Employees; Segmentation; Race; Change; United States;

    Citation:

    Ferguson, John-Paul, and Rembrand Koning. "Industrial Change, the Boundary of the Firm, and Racial Employment Segregation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-069, December 2019.  View Details
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  2. Working Paper | 2019

    The Value of Communication: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Entrepreneurs in Togo

    Stefan Dimitriadis and Rembrand Koning

    Why do some entrepreneurs benefit from their portfolio of peer advisers while others do not? In this study, we argue that communication practices are an important but overlooked factor in the formation of useful advice relationships between entrepreneurs, particularly in the context of developing economies. We hypothesize that improving entrepreneurs’ communication practices will affect the relationships they form and have implications for their business performance. To test our theory, we conducted a field experiment in Togo with 301 entrepreneurs who were randomized into a communication practices intervention that was embedded in a business training program. We found that entrepreneurs who were exposed to better communication practices perceived interactions more cooperatively and exchanged more information during those interactions. Moreover, improving communication practices also led to a 50 percent increase in the number of relationships entrepreneurs formed with peers. These relationships exhibited more matching based on skill and were more ethnically diverse. Finally, communication practices training also substantially increased entrepreneurs’ business performance. Our findings highlight how communication practices play a central role in entrepreneurs’ ability to form portfolios of relationships and perform in challenging business environments.

    Keywords: communication practices; business relationships; Entrepreneurship; Communication; Developing Countries and Economies; Africa; Togo;

    Citation:

    Dimitriadis, Stefan, and Rembrand Koning. "The Value of Communication: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Entrepreneurs in Togo." SSRN Working Paper Series, No. 3459643, September 2019.  View Details
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  3. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

    Female Inventors and Inventions

    Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila and John-Paul Ferguson

    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.

    Keywords: innovation; Biomedical Research; Innovation and Invention; Diversity; Gender; Research; Health; United States;

    Citation:

    Koning, Rembrand, Sampsa Samila, and John-Paul Ferguson. "Female Inventors and Inventions." Working Paper. (SSRN Working Paper Series, No. 3401889, June 2019.)  View Details
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  4. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

    Experimentation and Startup Performance: Evidence from A/B testing

    Rembrand Koning, Sharique Hasan and Aaron Chatterji

    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.

    Keywords: experimentation; A/B Testing; Entrepreneurship; Strategy; Business Startups; Technology; Performance;

    Citation:

    Koning, Rembrand, Sharique Hasan, and Aaron Chatterji. "Experimentation and Startup Performance: Evidence from A/B testing." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-018, August 2019. (SSRN Working Paper Series, No. 3440291, August 2019.)  View Details
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  5. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

    Does Public Ownership and Accountability Increase Diversity? Evidence from IPOs

    Rembrand Koning and John-Paul Ferguson

    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.

    Keywords: IPO; Initial Public Offering; Employees; Diversity; Gender; Race; Entrepreneurship; United States;

    Citation:

    Koning, Rembrand, and John-Paul Ferguson. "Does Public Ownership and Accountability Increase Diversity? Evidence from IPOs." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-071, January 2019.  View Details
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  6. Working Paper | 2016

    Do Network Dynamics Undermine Idea-based Network Advantages? Experimental Results from an Entrepreneurship Bootcamp

    Rembrand Koning

    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.

    Keywords: Networks; Performance; Business Startups; Business Strategy;

    Citation:

    Koning, Rembrand. "Do Network Dynamics Undermine Idea-based Network Advantages? Experimental Results from an Entrepreneurship Bootcamp." Working Paper, August 2016.  View Details
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Cases and Teaching Materials

  2. Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2018 (Revised January 2020)

    Walmart Inc. takes on Amazon.com

    David Collis, Andy Wu, Rembrand Koning and Huaiyi CiCi Sun

    This case explores how Walmart should compete with Amazon.

    Keywords: Strategy; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Retail Industry;

    Citation:

    Collis, David, Andy Wu, Rembrand Koning, and Huaiyi CiCi Sun. "Walmart Inc. takes on Amazon.com." Harvard Business School Case 718-481, January 2018. (Revised January 2020.)  View Details
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  3. Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2020

    Thinx, Inc. - Breaking Barriers in Feminine Care

    Rembrand Koning, Elie Ofek and Nicole Keller

    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.

    Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Growth and Development Strategy; Marketing Strategy; United States;

    Citation:

    Koning, Rembrand, Elie Ofek, and Nicole Keller. "Thinx, Inc. - Breaking Barriers in Feminine Care." Harvard Business School Case 720-443, March 2020.  View Details
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  5. Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2018 (Revised August 2018)

    Matching Markets for Googlers

    Bo Cowgill and Rembrand Koning

    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.

    Keywords: market design; people analytics; google; labor market; staffing; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Selection and Staffing; Goals and Objectives; Technology Industry; United States;

    Citation:

    Cowgill, Bo, and Rembrand Koning. "Matching Markets for Googlers." Harvard Business School Case 718-487, March 2018. (Revised August 2018.) (More about Bo Cowgill.)  View Details
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