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A few hundred years ago, it was considered a virtue to know a little bit about everything. They even had a word for it: “Renaissance man.” Now, with...
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Evolutionary Nature of Breakthrough Innovation: Re-Evaluating the Exploration vs. Exploitation Dichotomy
By: Dominika K. Sarnecka and Gary P. Pisano
Over the past few decades, a consensus has emerged that breakthrough innovations emerge from exploration of novel terrain while more routine innovations are the product of exploitation. In this paper, we revisit this explore versus exploit dichotomy with an analysis...
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- 2020
- Article
Robust and Stable Black Box Explanations
By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Nino Arsov and Osbert Bastani
As machine learning black boxes are increasingly
being deployed in real-world applications, there
has been a growing interest in developing post
hoc explanations that summarize the behaviors
of these black boxes. However, existing algorithms for generating such...
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- 2020
- Article
Incorporating Interpretable Output Constraints in Bayesian Neural Networks
By: Wanqian Yang, Lars Lorch, Moritz Graule, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Finale Doshi-Velez
Domains where supervised models are deployed often come with task-specific constraints, such as prior expert knowledge on the ground-truth function, or desiderata
like safety and fairness. We introduce a novel probabilistic framework for reasoning with such constraints...
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- December 2020
- Article
Taking Innovation to the Streets: Micro-geography, Physical Structure and Innovation
By: Maria P. Roche
In this paper, we analyze how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange. We exploit a novel data set covering all Census Block Groups in the contiguous United States with information on innovation outcomes,...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work
We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employee's digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Digitization and the Demand for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project
By: Abhishek Nagaraj and Imke Reimers
The digital era promised to deliver a centralized repository of all pre-existing knowledge through mass digitization. However, concerns about cannibalizing demand for physical works have led publishers and authors to block the realization of this vision. We investigate...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Iterative Coordination and Innovation
By: Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu
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...
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- Article
A Theories-in-Use Approach to Building Marketing Theory
By: G. Zaltman, Valarie A. Zeithaml, Bernard Jaworski, Ajay K. Kohli, Kapil R. Tuli and Wolfgang Ulaga
This article’s objective is to inspire and provide guidance on the development of marketing knowledge based on the theories-in-use (TIU) approach. The authors begin with a description of the TIU approach and compare it with other inductive and deductive research...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Throwing the Baby Out with the Drinking Water: Unintended Consequences of Arsenic Mitigation Efforts in Bangladesh
By: Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster and Reshmaan Hussam
The 1994 discovery of arsenic in ground water in Bangladesh prompted a massive public health effort to test all tubewells in the country and convince nearly one-quarter of the population to switch to arsenic-free drinking water sources. According to numerous sources,...
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- 2017
- Working Paper
Knowledge Flows within Multinationals—Estimating Relative Influence of Headquarters and Host Context Using a Gravity Model
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Mike Horia Teodorescu and Tarun Khanna
From the perspective of a multinational subsidiary, we employ the classic gravity equation in economics to model and compare knowledge flows to the subsidiary from the MNC headquarters and from the host country context. We also generalize traditional economics gravity...
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- Article
Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows
By: Samer Faraj, Georg von Krogh, Eric Monteiro and Karim R. Lakhani
Online communities frequently create significant economic and relational value for community participants and beyond. It is widely accepted that the underlying source of such value is the collective flow of knowledge among community participants. We distinguish the...
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- October 2016
- Article
Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance and Resource Allocation in Science
By: Kevin J. Boudreau, Eva Guinan, Karim R. Lakhani and Christoph Riedl
Selecting among alternative innovative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific research projects. We argue that the "intellectual distance" between the knowledge embodied in...
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- 2017
- Working Paper
A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy
I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it...
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- September 2016
- Article
The Effect of Target Difficulty on Target Completion: The Case of Reducing Carbon Emissions
By: Ioannis Ioannou, Shelley Xin Li and George Serafeim
Targets are an integral component of management control systems and play a significant role in achieving desirable performance outcomes. We focus on a key environmental performance objective—reduction of carbon emissions—as a setting in which to examine how target...
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- September–October 2015
- Article
Facts and Figuring: An Experimental Investigation of Network Structure and Performance in Information and Solution Spaces
By: Jesse Shore, Ethan Bernstein and David Lazer
Using data from a novel laboratory experiment on complex problem solving in which we varied the structure of 16-person networks, we investigate how an organization's network structure shapes performance of problem-solving tasks. Problem solving, we argue, involves both...
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Keywords:
Networks;
Experiments;
Clustering;
Problem Solving;
Exploration And Exploitation;
Knowledge;
Search;
Collaboration;
Collaboration Structures;
Transparency;
Communication;
Communication Technology;
Information;
Knowledge Use and Leverage;
Organizational Design;
Organizational Structure;
Performance Effectiveness;
Theory;
Information Industry;
Information Technology Industry;
Public Administration Industry;
Technology Industry;
Service Industry
- 2014
- Working Paper
The Organizational and Geographic Drivers of Absorptive Capacity: An Empirical Analysis of Pharmaceutical R&D Laboratories
By: Francesca Lazzeri and Gary P. Pisano
Scholars and practitioners alike now recognize that a firm's capacity to assimilate and use know-how from external sources—what Cohen and Levinthal (1990) called "absorptive capacity"—plays a central role in innovation performance. In recent years, a common strategy...
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- Fall 2013
- Article
Spurring Innovation Through Competitions
By: Alan MacCormack, Fiona Murray and Erika Wagner
Alan MacCormack, Fiona Murray, and Erika Wagner examine the phenomenon of corporations using innovation contests. They write: "Companies are searching for better ways to identify and exploit novel solutions. Increasingly, they are discovering that many of the very best...
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- Article
Beyond Magic Bullets: True Innovation in Health Care
By: Vaibhav A. Narayan, Marco Mohwinckel, Gary Pisano, Michael Yang and Husseini Manji
The molecular medicine revolution—based on advances in fields such as genomics and network modeling in the decade since the human genome sequence was completed—has changed the way we think about, study, and approach the development of novel therapies. However, these...
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- July 2012 (Revised August 2012)
- Case
Global Knowledge Management at Danone (A) (Abridged)
By: Amy C. Edmondson and David Lane
This case explores French consumer goods company Danone's novel approach to knowledge management. In 2007, Human Resource Chief (Executive Vice President) Franck Mougin assesses the company's knowledge-sharing tools and considers his options going forward. Through...
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- 2010
- Chapter
Unlocking the Slices of Genius in Your Organization: Leading for Innovation
By: Linda A. Hill, Maurizio Travaglini, Greg Brandeau and Emily Stecker
There is a widespread consensus that innovation is fast becoming the principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage in today's knowledge-intensive economy. But until we reframe our understanding of what innovation and leadership are all about, we fear...
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