With a recent report from the United Nations warning that climate change has already begun to cause irreversible damage, experts during the 2022 Kenan Institute Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Conference discussed the role innovation can – and should – be playing to combat these ill effects. This week’s insight explores the topic through Q&A with Dr. Eric Toone, executive managing director and technology lead at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Dr. Jacqueline Pless, the Fred Kayne (1960) Career Development Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management.
Out of the rubble of World War II, we collectively and deliberately built an institutional order that established norms of acceptable behavior and placed constraints on powerful nations. While work remains to create broader economic opportunity and some regions have suffered terrible conflict, the economic and financial globalization that this order fostered nevertheless yielded the greatest period of peace and economic prosperity that humanity has ever known. The more than 70 years since the war’s conclusion are, however, very atypical, and we are now returning to a setting far more familiar to any student of history, where strength and power supersede norms and rules. The world is characterized by a renewed struggle between illiberal autocracy and liberal democracy.
Examining the strategy formation process is central to understanding why some firms in entrepreneurial settings create competitive advantage and succeed while others do not. While existing work shows the value of learning from experience or having a holistic understanding of how the pieces fit together, there is limited empirical research that fuses the two streams. We first review the extant literature on strategy formation in entrepreneurial settings by organizing around this fundamental tension between strategizing by “doing” versus “thinking.” We then describe recent work that blends the two and conclude with a future research agenda.
We characterize how wishful thinking affects the interpretation of information in economies with strategic and external effects. While players always choose to exhibit overconfidence in private information, their interpretation of public information depends on how non-fundamental volatility affects payoffs. When volatility increases payoffs, players may endogenously disagree: some under-react to public news, while others overreact.
Strategy formation is central to why some firms succeed in entrepreneurial settings while others do not. Prior research suggests that executives effectively form strategies through actions to learn about novel opportunities, and thinking to develop a holistic understanding of the complex set of activities that must fit together.
Crowdsourcing has been used to spur innovation and increase community engagement in public health programmes. Crowdsourcing is the process of giving individual tasks to a large group, often involving open contests and enabled through multisectoral partnerships. Here we describe one crowdsourced video intervention in which a video promoting condom use is produced through an open contest. The aim of this study is to determine whether a crowdsourced intervention is as effective as a social marketing intervention in promoting condom use among high-risk men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender male-to-female (TG) in China.
This study explores the process of organizational change by examining localized social learning in organizational subunits. Specifically, we examine participation in university technology transfer, a new organizational initiative, by tracking 1,780 faculty members, examining their backgrounds and work environments, and following their engagement with academic entrepreneurship.
To encourage year-long engagement and invite more people into the conversation, the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the Entrepreneurship Center at UNC have produced the first-ever Trends in Entrepreneurship Report. Combining data with expert analysis, the report gives timely insights into the topics that significantly affect entrepreneurs, funders, ecosystem partners, policymakers and others in the innovation economy.
We propose a novel approach to measuring firm-level risk exposures and costs of equity. Using a simple consumption-based asset pricing model that explains nearly two-thirds of the variation in average returns across 55 anomaly portfolios, we map the relation between exposures to consumption risk and portfolio-level characteristics. We use this relation to calculate exposures to consumption risk at the firm level and show that the calculated consumption risk exposures yield portfolios with large differences in average returns and ex post consumption risk exposures consistent with those predicted by our calculated betas.
We introduce a novel approach to estimating latent oil risk factors and establish their significance in pricing nonoil securities. Our model, which features four factors with simple economic interpretations, is estimated using both derivative prices and oil-related equity returns.
We investigate the role of mindfulness as a regulatory factor by examining whether it mitigates the relationship between justice and retaliation. Drawing on theories of self-regulation, we integrate work on justice with emerging frameworks that identify mindfulness as an important work-related regulatory variable (Glomb, Duffy, Bono, & Yang, 2011).
We undertake an empirical study of the impact of delay announcements on callers' abandonment behavior and the performance of a call center with two priority classes. A Cox regression analysis reveals that in this call center, callers' abandonment behavior is affected by the announcement messages heard.
We examine the relationship between MIDAS regressions and the estimation of state space models applied to mixed frequency data. While in some cases the binding function is known, in general it is not, and therefore indirect inference is called for. The approach is appealing when we consider state space models which feature stochastic volatility, or other non-Gaussian and nonlinear settings where maximum likelihood methods require computationally demanding approximate filters.
Ballooning levels of societal inequality have led to a resurgence of interest in the economic causes and consequences of wealth disparity. What has drawn less attention in the scientific literature is how different levels of resource inequality influence what types of individuals emerge as leaders. In the current paper we take a distal approach to understanding the psychological consequences of inequality and the associated implications for leadership.
My particular path has contained, as most paths do, twists and turns. As I look back, they all seem somehow related to each other, but they were not all planned. Design/methodology/approach I will discuss my life and career in chronological order, then reflect on my career and research philosophy. I will also discuss several of my most cited articles and how they emerged. Findings I emphasize research that is both academically rigorous and relevant to business. I also show that passion for a subject, even one that is risky and not encouraged by others, has resulted in lifelong interest and inspiration for me.
We apply advances in analysis of mix frequency and sparse data to estimate “unsmoothed” private equity (PE) Net Asset Values (NAVs) at the weekly frequency for individual funds. Using simulations and a large sample of buyout and venture funds, we show that our method yields superior estimates of fund asset values than a simple approach based on comparable public asset and as-reported NAVs.