Research

1. Environmental Uncertainty and Organizational Performance: How does environmental uncertainty affect organizational survival and performance? We know that uncertainty is usually bad for (existing) organizations because it makes decision-making difficult. But sometimes, uncertainty can actually give organizations the ability to challenge the status quo and shape the future. My papers in this stream address the good, the bad, and the ugly results of uncertainty coming from changes in the political environment.

2. Organizational Environments and Innovation: How do poverty, weak institutions, and conflict shape innovation? How can governments create innovation-led growth, given the reality on the ground? I suggest that internet innovation may be a way to get there. I propose a new comparative measure of internet innovation. Among other things, I find that internet innovation isn’t always complementary to other forms of innovation, and that it is more resilient to bad environments and shocks than other forms of innovation. In my work with Dan Breznitz, I explore why and how equitable representation matters in the production of innovation and propose ‘representation-sensitive innovation policies’ to get there. In my work on the Space Economy (R&R at Research Policy), I show how government procurement policies incentivize space ventures deploying increasingly sophisticated satellites, but that this undermines entrepreneurial exploration, ecosystem development, and ultimately the development of bigger commercial markets for space data.

3. Methods and Measurement, Artificial Intelligence: Across much of my work, I create new measures of hard-to-measure constructs. Many such constructs can only be measured with difficult-to-obtain data, such as truthful survey responses in authoritarian regimes, or unstructured documents. I address the former via creative sampling, questionnaire, and/or research designs, while I often tackle the latter using AI/ML. For instance, in my prospective JMP, I measure corporate political connections through social networks of politicians, managers, and businesses. Many of the connections could only be measured because I processed and ‘made sense’ of almost a million pages of leaked corporate registry documents. In my internet innovation paper, I use data from the domain name system to get at the general population of online content. I also develop tools and software packages to deal with some of the challenges I encounter in the field.