Fall 2008 Schedule
Mondays – 11:30-1 pm (E52-598)
|
Date |
Speaker
(Affiliation) |
Title
and Abstract |
|
Sept. 15 |
Olav Sorensen (U. Toronto) |
|
|
Sept. 22 |
James Utterback (MIT) |
Explorations in Technology, Innovation and
Entrepreneurship |
|
Sept. 29 |
Ramana Nanda (HBS) |
Finance and the Diffusion of New Technologies |
|
Oct. 20 |
Ethan Mollick (MIT) (informal I&E session) |
People and Process, Suits and
Innovators: Individuals and Firm Performance |
|
Oct. 27 |
Hazhir Rahmandad (Virginia Tech) (Strategy) |
|
|
Nov. 3 |
Sung Joo Bae and Chuck Eesley (MIT) (informal I&E session) |
“Who has ‘the right stuff’? Human
Capital, Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change in China” “Learning at the
Boundary of the Firm: What is Happening Between Learning-By-Doing and
Learning-By-Using” |
|
Nov. 24 |
Alan MacCormack (MIT) |
Exploring the
Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the
"Mirroring" Hypothesis Abstract: We report results from a study which examines the question of
whether a product's design tends to "mirror" the organization from
which it comes. That is, do modular organizations produce more
modular products? We explore this relationship in the software industry
by use of a technique called Design Structure Matrices (DSMs), which allows
us to visualize the architectures of different software products and to
calculate metrics to compare their levels of modularity. Our research
takes advantage of a natural experiment in this industry, where products
exist that fulfill the same function, but that are developed using different
organizational modes: specifically, open source (distributed) versus
closed source (collocated) development. Using a matched-pair design, we
test whether these modes are associated with differences in product
architecture. Our results reveal dramatic differences in modularity,
consistent with the notion that products mirror the architectures of the
organizations that create them. We close by highlighting some
implications of this result, and sketching some directions for future
research. |
|
Dec. 1 |
Nick Bloom (Stanford) (Strategy Session) |
Abstract: The US experienced a sustained
increase in productivity growth in the decade after 1995, particularly in
sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This
“productivity miracle” did not occur in Europe. This paper uses two distinct
micro datasets to show that US multinationals operating in Europe also
experienced a “productivity miracle”. US multinationals obtained higher
productivity from IT than non-US multinationals in Europe, particularly in
the sectors responsible for the US productivity acceleration. Furthermore,
establishments that are taken over by US multinationals increased the
productivity of their IT, whereas observationally identical establishments
taken over by non-US multinationals did not. Combining a new pan-European IT
dataset with our firm-level management practices survey, we find that the US
advantage in IT is primarily due to its “people management” practices on
promotions, rewards, hiring and firing. USstyle people management appears to
be associated with the ability to adopt new IT more effectively. As a result
US firms at home and abroad experienced large increases in productivity
growth when IT investment rose sharply after 1995. We can account for about
half of the US-EU difference in productivity growth using our estimates. |
|
Dec. 8 |
Scott Stern (Northwestern) |
ABSTRACT: Scientific
freedom and openness are hallmarks of academia: relative to their
counterparts in industry, academics maintain discretion over their research
agenda and allow others to build on their discoveries. This paper
examines the relationship between openness and freedom, building on recent
models emphasizing that, from an economic perspective, freedom is the
granting of control rights to researchers. Within this framework,
openness of upstream research does not simply encourage higher levels of
downstream exploitation. It also raises the incentives for additional
upstream research by encouraging the establishments of entirely new research
directions. In other words, within academia, restrictions on scientific
openness (such as those created by formal intellectual property rights (IPR))
may limit the diversity and experimentation of basic research itself.
We test this hypothesis by examining a natural experiment in openness within
the academic community: NIH agreements during the late 1990s that
circumscribed IP restrictions for academics regarding certain genetically
engineered mice. Using a sample of engineered mice that are linked to
scientific papers (some affected by the NIH agreements and some not), we
implement a differences-in-differences estimator to evaluate how the level
and type of follow-on research using these mice changes after the NIH-induced
increase in openness. We find a significant increase in the level of
follow-on research. Moreover, this increase is driven by a substantial
increase in the rate of exploration of more diverse research paths.
Overall, our findings highlight a neglected cost of IPR: reductions in
the diversity of experimentation that follows from a single idea. |
|
Dec. 15 |
Danny Breznitz (Georgia Tech) |
Seminar Organizers: Chuck Eesley, Michaël Bikard, Phil Anderson
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