New research on innovation suggests that employees that are curious about mastering their workplace, and that desire to work more effectively, will have a higher ability to find useful information in the global marketplace and commercialize it.

House of Innovation Assistant Professor, Erik Wetter, joined a panel of data experts convened in late 2020 to address concerns about data, analytics, automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Business success, especially for entrepreneurs who are just starting out, is often measured in terms of new venture growth. Unfortunately, this kind of growth can be hard to achieve for entrepreneurs who don’t have access to many resources.

Groups of professionals hardly ever work alone. Often, occupational groups benefit from exchanging and relying on the expertise of other occupational groups. Or they many need to collaborate to complete a given project. These exchanges of knowledge and services require a considerable amount of coordination.

Many daughters and sons growing up in a successful family business and who have their own entrepreneurial ideas struggle to become autonomous from the family’s business. Most research tends to examine how younger, next generation family members build their careers by engaging in internal venturing as a way of growing their existing family business. What is lacking here is research that looks at the ways in which these daughters and sons rely on external venturing, that is, to start their own business outside the existing family business, to achieve greater autonomy and pursue their independent business ideas.

The way that new ventures are financed is very important. It has substantial implications for a company’s survival, growth, and performance. For this reason, a lot of research exists that examines what explains startups’ choices of financing sources, typically drawing on rational economic theories such as pecking order or trade off theories.

When organizations grow too fast, they expose themselves to several risks. In the past, research has shown that people who try to move forward without careful evaluation is often associated with unethical decision-making, while taking time to evaluate consequences is associated with ethical decisions. Does this same rule apply also to organizations?

Alliances are at the core of firms’ innovation strategies. They allow firms to strengthen their innovation activities by providing access to technological knowledge developed by other firms. For this reason, alliances are particularly common in high-tech industries where the market position of firms is very dependent on their ability to introduce new and improved products and services. Often, however, alliances fail to meet expectations and do not lead to valuable outputs. It is therefore important to understand what distinguishes successful from less successful alliances.

Exploratory research goes beyond testing existing ideas to illuminate phenomena without regard to offering a specific reason for doing so. For this reason, exploratory research is vital to entrepreneurship research where new phenomenon such as crowdfunding, social ventures, and digital business models emerge that scholars may lack existing tools to explain. Well-done exploratory research offers a great opportunity to make useful contributions to entrepreneurship scholarship.

An increasing number of family firms choose to select a non-family CEO for the highest executive office when there is no suitable family member available. A recent example of this is the Swedish retail giant H&M where the third generation family member Karl-Johan Persson recently handed over to the non-family CEO Helena Helmersson. However, appointing a non-family CEO in a family firm tends to give rise to tensions.