Harvard Business School

This paper studies the role of diversity and performance in the entrepreneurial teams.

What is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming peer connections themselves? This paper argues that entrepreneurs may be under-networked because they lack the necessary social skills that allow them to match efficiently with knowledgeable peers.

Workers who sort into institutional settings they prefer may work twice (or many more times) as hard in these preferred settings. This productivity effect is especially important in institutional settings where a taste for competition is strongest.

This experiment in the context of medical research grants indicates a discount of novelty in research proposals, which may be due to evaluators internalising the average effects of novelty for potential concerns about the lower success rates. However, this censoring of novel projects means that experiments never get a chance to be run and thus the benefits of generating greater diversity of experiments are curtailed. This is of concern to policy makers and society because research funds are being allocated towards more incremental research as compared to high variability and potentially breakthrough efforts.

Field experiments have the potential to provide unambiguous causal evidence on innovation topics while simultaneously assisting organisations with their innovation.

Search costs continue to powerfully shape (and limit) the formation of collaborations between scientists. Formation of collaborations appears
to be highly sensitive to information-rich face-to-face interactions, which existing communications technologies may not sufficiently substitute.