This week our panelists examined the myriad ways the entrepreneurial community is driving innovation and delivering stories of hope in the face of COVID-19. This briefing features UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship Mahka Moeen, UNC Entrepreneurship Center Faculty Director Ted Zoller, UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Pharm.D. candidate Diana Lee and UNC Applied Physical Science Department Professor and Chair Rich Superfine.
A panel of experts convened by UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, its affiliated Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Institute of African American Research offered a press briefing via webinar on the intersection of the COVID-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement—providing a framework for developing solutions to achieve equitable public health and economic outcomes for the short- and long-term. This press briefing featured Duke University Political Science Ph.D. Candidate Ajenai Clemmons, City of Pittsburgh Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Equity Officer Majestic Lane, Center for Responsible Lending Executive Vice President Nikitra Bailey and CREATE Executive Director and Black Communities Conference Co-founder Mark Little.
For hospitals, a corollary to the popular adage “what gets measured gets managed” could be “measure more accurately to manage costs better.” That seems to be true even in industries like healthcare, where corporations and the government have been struggling for years to control hydra-like costs. UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School accounting professor Eva Labro and Lorien Stice-Lawrence (PhD ’17) found one way to significantly cut hospital costs is to upgrade accounting systems in their forthcoming paper in Management Science.
When the federal government, state governments, industry, foundations and nonprofit organizations support scientific research, they do so with the goal of uncovering innovations and advancing science. But what about private donors? Their funding goals may not be as clear as those of mission- or profit-driven entities, but the substantial gifts of high-net-worth donors have substantial capacity to support significant scientific findings, societal outcomes and economic returns on investment. CREATE Project Manager Emily Nwakpuda shares her research in this area.
This article examines the development of university technology transfer operations at the Research Triangle region’s three universities.
This year Rethinc. Labs joined the Duke Quantum Center and the IBM Quantum Hub at NC State to bring their Financial Services focus to the Triangle Quantum Computing Seminar Series. For our next discussion we welcome Dylan Herman, from the JPMorgan Chase Future Lab for Applied Research and Engineering (FLARE). The focus of the FLARE quantum program is to develop quantum algorithms for financial applications and quantum-resistant cryptographic solutions.
How does sentiment in a pitch affect an entrepreneur’s fundraising outcomes? Although research suggests that negativity in entrepreneurial “pitches” to investors adversely impacts resource acquisition, there is a lack of empirical research showing whether, and to what extent, this is true. We study over 30,000 entrepreneurial loan requests from one of the largest loan marketplaces to understand how the sentiment in text-only pitches to investors affects fundraising. In contrast to prior literature, we find that negatively-worded pitches are funded faster than positively-worded ones.
Research and practice suggest that cofounded ventures outperform solo-founded ventures. Yet, little work has explored the conditions under which solo founding might be preferable to cofounding. Combining an inductive case-oriented analysis with a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 70 new entrepreneurial ventures, we examine why and how solo founders can be as successful as their peers in cofounded ventures.
Collective action is critical for successful market formation. However, relatively little is known about how and under what conditions actors overcome collective action problems to successfully form new markets. Using the benefits of simulation methods, we uncover how collective action problems result from actor resource allocation decisions interacting with each other and how the severity of these problems depends on central market- and actor-related characteristics.
We examine how mission-oriented grand challenges—formed to address the public sector’s unmet needs through development of new technologies and products for high potential impact—originate and catalyze industry incubation. Our analysis of six prominent cases identifies the incubation process, consisting of identification of unmet needs as a grand challenge, championing and articulation of a mission, leverage of private enterprise, and success or failure of the mission for subsequent industry emergence.
Following state-level legal changes that increase labor dismissal costs, firms increase their innovation in new processes that facilitate the adoption of cost-saving production methods, especially in industries with a large share of labor costs in total costs. Firms with high innovation ability exhibit larger increases in process innovation and capital-labor ratios, an effect driven by both increases in capital investment and decreases in employment. By facilitating the adjustment of the input mix when conditions in input markets change, innovation ability allows firms to mitigate value losses and is a key driver of their performance.
To be effective, experts need to simultaneously develop others (i.e. provide advice and feedback to novices) and advance their own learning (i.e. seek and incorporate advice and feedback from others). However, expertise, and the state of efficacy associated with it, can inhibit experts from engaging in these activities or doing so effectively. We discuss when and why cognitive entrenchment and reduced perspective taking lead experts to hold misperceptions about others. We then explain how these misperceptions lead experts to provide less helpful advice and feedback to novices and to be less likely to seek and take input from others. We offer insights to overcome these barriers, enhancing experts’ ability to provide and propensity to seek advice and feedback.
Hierarchies emerge as collectives attempt to organize themselves toward successful performance. Consequently, research has focused on how team hierarchies affect performance. We extend existing models of the hierarchy-performance relationship by adopting an alternative: Performance is not only an output of hierarchy but also a critical input, as teams’ hierarchical differentiation may vary based on whether they are succeeding.
Research suggests that women negotiators tend to obtain worse outcomes than men; however, we argue this finding does not apply to all women. Integrating research on social hierarchies, gender in negotiations, and intersectional stereotype content, we develop a theoretical framework that explains the interactive effect of race and gender on offers and outcomes received in distributive negotiations.
Teams often need to adapt to planned discontinuous task change or fundamental alteration of tasks, tools, and work systems. Although team adaptation theories have made substantive progress in explaining how teams can respond to change, they have not adequately considered the unique impact that discontinuous task change can have on teams. Such change can render not only collective but also individual task capabilities obsolete and necessitate a multilevel task relearning process. Drawing on the team compilation model, we suggest that adaptation to discontinuous task change is akin to team (re)development.
Given that mask-wearing proved to be an important tool to slow the spread of infection during the COVID-19 pandemic, investigating the psychological and cultural factors that influence norms for mask wearing across cultures is exceptionally important. One factor that may influence mask wearing behavior is the degree to which people believe masks potentially impair emotion recognition.
Acquisitions are notoriously difficult to execute successfully. Poor implementation of the post-acquisition integration process is a major source of acquisition value destruction. To surface new solutions for this vexing problem, we leverage the emerging triadic view of M&A activities, which emphasizes the interconnectedness between sellers, acquirers, and the units that are transferred between them.
As individuals seek success, destructive interpersonal clashes can emerge when they believe they can only succeed at the expense of others. Prior work suggests this zero-sum construal of success is more likely occur when people receive negative feedback regarding their achievement. In the present research, we identify another element in the workplace that can strengthen zero-sum beliefs, and not just for those who receive negative feedback, but even for those who receive positive feedback.
We hypothesize that after a relaxation of short selling constraints, an escalation in short selling activity will heighten incentives for short sellers to accelerate price discovery by revealing their negative information. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the overall sentiment of media coverage tilts significantly more negative for pilot relative to control firms following exogenous relief of short sale constraints.
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi of the UNC School of Information and Library Science explores the competitive and cooperative skills that organizations will seek in both their employees and their artificial intelligence systems for Harvard Business Review.