Essays on managing innovation

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how choices by managers in research and entrepreneurial settings affect innovation and entrepreneurial outcomes. In the first three chapters, my coauthors and I consider the role of grant-makers in inducing exploitation or exploration among grant recipients at ARPA-E. We use internal data from ARPA-E project selection and quarterly performance reviews to show how active project management enables risk mitigation across a portfolio of projects. In the fourth chapter, we consider a set of decisions made by entrepreneurs related to technology commercialization. Specifically, this paper reconceptualizes the Technology S-Curve not as a technological given but as an envelope of potential outcomes derived by managerial action. We define and investigate a choice-based approach along several key dimensions of technological options, including the tradeoff between exploration versus exploitation, generality versus specialized versions of a technology, and modular versus systems-oriented innovations. In the fifth chapter, I empirically assess I-Corps, an entrepreneurial training program at the National Science Foundation. Using data from the last 11 years of NSF-grant awardees, I find that entrepreneurial training reduces perceived barriers for academics to commercialize their research, resulting in the formation of more innovation-driven enterprises. The results are particularly important for early-career academics, for example graduate students and post docs. The results also confirm that barriers to commercialization are higher for women and academics in locations that are not traditional hubs of entrepreneurship.