About
William Mackie Chair Professor of strategy and technology innovation management. My research focuses on creating and testing organizational and strategic theories related to the micro-mechanisms that facilitate learning and technological change. It is guided by two inter-related research questions:
- How does flow of knowledge across firm boundaries,through various sources,affect learning and change?
- How do social and technological contexts within a firm affect the firm’s ability to leverage its existing and new inflowing knowledge?
Cumulatively, my research to date demonstrates that while the source and characteristics of knowledge inflows and outflows affect a company’s opportunities for learning and development of new technology, our understanding of these relationships is incomplete without considering the firm’s social context and technological characteristics. Additionally, in contrast to the existing theoretical effort to identify forces that encourage organizations to favor incremental changes through exploiting existing knowledge, my work opens up new avenues of understanding the mechanisms that facilitate significant technological transformations in organizations. I highlight the micro-mechanisms associated with human capital as a key driver of these transformations. This research provides the foundation for future integration of literatures on learning, knowledge-based view and network theories to address the intriguing question about: how do a firm’s human, technological and social capitals interact to facilitate/hinder the development/transformation of the firm’s technological capabilities?
By integrating human capital theory with learning and network theories, my research provides a theoretical and empirical meeting ground for economists, organizational theorists, and strategic human capital scholars.