Adaptation and learning are fundamental to human progress, as well as to the growth and survival of organizations. My work examines the factors that foster or inhibit these essential processes. In particular, during my doctoral studies, I started tackling this question at the macro level, by looking at innovation and dynamic capabilities. As I delved deeper into the core of what makes firms able to adapt and learn over time, I became interested in the meso and micro mechanisms that enable these processes inside organizations. This shift toward a more behavioral view of strategy deeply affected my research trajectory, and, more broadly, my approach to research.
My research develops along three lines of inquiry:
- Collaborating with competitors. This research focuses on the interplay between cooperation and competition, examining what pushes competing firms, teams, and/or individuals to share valuable private knowledge with one another. In particular, I have focused my attention on the role of informal mechanisms, such as social norms and organizational climate.
- Interacting with audiences. This research examines markets mediated by intermediaries, examining how organizations interact with different audiences as they try to establish their position in these markets. To date I have focused most of my attention on studying how organizations react to being evaluated by expert rankings and consumers ratings. I also have a series of qualitative works that are related to the theme of interacting with audiences as organizations in these markets emerge, grow, and adapt.
- Knowledge creation. This research explores how knowledge is created and diffused. In this domain, I have focused my attention on the micro-foundations of learning, as well as on the examination of how individuals (scholars) and the networks in which they are embedded (invisible colleges) contribute to the creation and diffusion of knowledge (literature streams).
My approach to research is characterized by four features:
- Question-driven. I usually start with a question or phenomenon of interest, rather than with a gap identified in the literature. I connect the question or phenomenon to extant theory, when possible, to try and identify a puzzle that my study can help solve, or a way in which I can contribute to extend the theory developed so far.
- Mixed-methods. I generally approach the question or phenomenon of interest with the recognition that no single empirical study provides a sufficient basis for inference, but that we can try to improve our ability to come closer to “the truth” by leveraging the complementarities among different methods.
- Full-cycle. In many of my papers, I start by triangulating extant theory and new insights from qualitative inquiry to develop a plausible answer to the original question. I leverage the power of lab-in-the-field experiments to test the emerging theory. And finally, I resort to qualitative data and/or laboratory experiments to gather evidence on the underlying mechanisms.
- Field-based. My research puts a strong emphasis on field work, both qualitative and experimental, as I try to strike an appropriate balance between rigor and relevance. To this end, I have partnered with a number of organizations to conduct experiments “in the wild.”