Keyvan Vakili

Keyvan Vakili

Associate Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at London Business School

Posts by Collection

portfolio

publications

Progress in Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research in the United States between 2001 and 2010

Co-author(s): Anita M. McGahan (UofT), Rahim Rezaie (UofT), Will Mitchell (UofT), Abdallah S. Daar (UofT)

Published in PLoS ONE, 2015

On August 9th, 2001, the federal government of the United States announced a policy restricting federal funds available for research on human embryonic stem cell (hESCs) out of concern for the “vast ethical mine fields” associated with the creation of embryos for research purposes. Until the policy was repealed on March 9th, 2009, no U.S. federal funds were available for research on hESCs extracted after August 9, 2001, and only limited federal funds were available for research on a subset of hESC lines that had previously been extracted. This paper analyzes how the 2001 U.S. federal funding restrictions influenced the quantity and geography of peer-reviewed journal publications on hESC. The primary finding is that the 2001 policy did not have a significant aggregate effect on hESC research in the U.S… Read more

Recommended citation: Vakili, K., McGahan, A. M., Rezaie, R., Mitchell, W., Daar, A. S. (2015). "Progress in Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research in the United States between 2001 and 2010." PLoS ONE. 10(3): e0120052.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120052

The Double-Edged Sword of Recombination in Breakthrough Innovation

Co-author(s): Sarah Kaplan (UofT)

Published in Strategic Management Journal, 2015

We explore the double-edged sword of recombination in generating breakthrough innovation: recombination of distant or diverse knowledge is needed because knowledge in a narrow domain might trigger myopia, but recombination can be counterproductive when local search is needed to identify anomalies. We take into account how creativity shapes both the cognitive novelty of the idea and the subsequent realization of economic value. We develop a text-based measure of novel ideas in patents using topic modeling to identify those patents that originate new topics in a body of knowledge. We find that… Read more

Recommended citation: Kaplan, S., Vakili, K. (2015). "The Double-Edged Sword of Recombination in Breakthrough Innovation." Strategic Management Journal. 36(10): 1435-1457.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.2294/abstract

Health Care’s Grand Challenge: Stimulating Basic Science on Diseases that Primarily Afflict the Poor

Co-author(s): Anita M. McGahan (UofT)

Published in Academy of Management Journal, 2016

Perhaps the most compelling Grand Challenge in health care is addressing diseases that primarily afflict the poor. Policies and practices conceived in high-income countries for improving the lives of patients in low-income countries have been criticized as ineffective or harmful. We examine the impact of one such policy, the World Trade Organization’s 1994 Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which was partly justified by a claim that patents and other intellectual property protections would improve the availability of drugs for “neglected diseases” such as malaria and tuberculosis. There is little evidence associating TRIPS with clinical trials, patents, or trade-in drugs for these diseases. One explanation for this is that basic science is required as a prerequisite to drug development. We theorize, test for, and find evidence that TRIPS encouraged the time-consuming and complex development of managerial institutions required for basic science on neglected diseases. The results indicate… Read more

Recommended citation: Vakili, K., McGahan, A. M. (2016). "Health Care’s Grand Challenge: Stimulating Basic Science on Diseases that Primarily Afflict the Poor." Academy of Management Journal. 59(6): 1917-1939.

http://amj.aom.org/content/59/6/1917.short

Collaborative Promotion of Technology Standards and the Impact on Innovation, Industry Structure, and Organizational Capabilities: Evidence from Modern Patent Pools

Published in Organization Science, 2016

This study explores the impact of modern patent pools—inter-organizational collaborative arrangements for promoting the adoption of technology standards—on the rate of follow-on innovations based on pooled technologies, the vertical structure of associated industries, and organizational capabilities of noncollaborating firms. On one hand, the formation of modern pools can boost follow-on innovation by lowering the search, negotiation, and licensing costs associated with pooled standards. On the other hand, modern pools may decrease the incentives to invest in follow-on innovations because of cannibalization risks and grant-back provisions. To the extent that modern pools succeed in establishing a dominant standard, their collaborative nature and their reliance on markets for technology can reduce technological uncertainty and appropriation hazards, hence triggering vertical disintegration in related industries. Moreover, by establishing a dominant standard, modern pools can effectively diminish the relative importance of integrative capabilities inside firms. Employing a combination of empirical strategies, I show… Read more

Recommended citation: Vakili, K. (2016). "Collaborative Promotion of Technology Standards and the Impact on Innovation, Industry Structure, and Organizational Capabilities: Evidence from Modern Patent Pools." Organization Science. 27(6): 1504-1524.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2016.1098

High on Creativity: The Impact of Social Liberalization Policies on Innovation

Co-author(s): Laurina Zhang (Georgia Tech)

Published in Strategic Management Journal, 2018

We use a large-sample inductive approach to explore the impact of two social liberalization policies (legalization of same-sex civil unions and medical marijuana) and one anti-liberalization policy (passage of abortion restrictions) on innovation. First, we show that liberalization policies increase state-level patenting while the anti-liberalization policy reduces patenting. Next, we examine three possible mechanisms that could explain the findings. The results suggest… Read more

Recommended citation: Vakili, K., Zhang, L. (2018). "High on Creativity: The Impact of Social Liberalization Policies on Innovation." Strategic Management Journal, 39(7): 1860-1886.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.2778/abstract

Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains

Co-author(s): Florenta Teodoridis (USC), Michael Bikard (LBS)

Published in Administrative Science Quarterly, 2019

Using the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse on the performance of theoretical mathematicians as a natural experiment, we attempt to resolve the controversy in prior research on whether specialists or generalists have superior creative performance. While many have highlighted generalists’ advantage due to access to a wider set of knowledge components, others have underlined the benefits that specialists can derive from their deep expertise. We argue that this disagreement might be partly driven by the fact that the pace of change in a knowledge domain shapes the relative return from being a specialist or a generalist… Read more

Recommended citation: Teodoridis, F., Bikard, M., Vakili, K. (2019). "Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast-and Slow-paced Domains." Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(4): 894-927.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0001839218793384

When Collaboration Bridges Institutions: The Impact of University-Industry Collaboration on Academic Productivity

Co-author(s): Florenta Teodoridis (USC), Michael Bikard (LBS)

Published in Organization Science, 2019

Prior research suggests that academic scientists who collaborate with firms may experience lower publication rates in their collaborative lines of work due to industry’s insistence on IP protection through patenting or secrecy. The main empirical challenge of examining the effect of industry collaboration on scientific productivity is that research projects that involve industry collaborators may be qualitatively different from those that do not. Hence, any difference in subsequent output of academic scientists who collaborate with industry may be driven by differences in the nature of research projects that attract industry collaborators. To address this issue, we exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries where multiple scientists make roughly the same discovery around the same time. Following a simultaneous discovery, we compare the follow-on research output of academic scientists who collaborated with industry on the discovery with that of academic scientists who did not. We find that academic scientists who collaborated with industry produce more follow-on publications and fewer follow-on patents on their collaborative research lines than their academic peers who did not collaborate with industry. Our results suggest… Read more

Recommended citation: Bikard, M., Vakili, K., Teodoridis, F., 2019. "When Collaboration Bridges Institutions: The Impact of University-Industry Collaboration on Academic Productivity" Organization Science, 30(2): 235-445.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2018.1235?journalCode=orsc

Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual Data

Co-author(s): Tim Hannigan (UAlberta), Richard Haans (Rotterdam School of Management), Hovig Tchalian (Claremont), Vern Glaser (UAlberta), Milo Wang (UAlberta), Sarah Kaplan (Rotman), Dev Jennings (Ualberta)

Published in Academy of Management Annals, 2019

ncreasingly, management researchers are using topic modeling, a new method borrowed from computer science, to reveal phenomenon-based constructs and grounded conceptual relationships in textual data. By conceptualizing topic modeling as the process of rendering constructs and conceptual relationships from textual data, we demonstrate how this new method can advance management scholarship without turning topic modeling into a black box of complex computer-driven algorithms… Read more

Recommended citation: Hannigan, T., Haans, R.F.J., Vakili, K., Tchalian, H., Glaser, V., Wang, M., Kaplan, S., Jennings, P.D. 2019. "Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual Data.." Academy of Management Annals, 13(2): 586-632.

https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/annals.2017.0099

Explaining heterogeneity in the organization of scientific work.

Co-author(s): Hazhir RahmandAD (MIT)

Published in Organization Science, 2019

Prior studies of academic science have largely focused on researchers in life sciences or engineering. However, while academic researchers often work under similar institutions, norms, and incentives, they vary greatly in how they organize their research efforts across different scientific domains. This heterogeneity, in turn, has important implications for innovation policy, the relationship between industry and academia, the scientific labor market, and the perceived deficit in the relevance of social sciences and humanities research. To understand this heterogeneity, we model scientists as publication-maximizing agents, identifying two distinct organizational patterns that are optimal under different parameters… Read more

Recommended citation: Rahmandad, H., Vakili, K. 2019. "Explaining Heterogeneity in the Organization of Scientific Work." Organization Science, 30(6): 1125-1393.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2019.1303

talks

teaching

Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PhD)

PhD Programme, London Business School, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, 2015-2016

Course Description: This seminar provides an introduction to seminal readings in innovation and entrepreneurship. The focus is on theory building and empirical testing of the factors shaping key aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship. Specifically, our objective is to understand to the major theoretical threads and controversies in the field. It will also examine the methodologies that are important to research in this area. Read more

EMBA International Assignment (South Africa)

EMBA Programme, London Business School, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, 2015-2016

Course Description: During the International Assignment to South Africa, students will be involved in an intensive weeklong project at a local South African organisation. The exercise is framed around multi-stakeholder engagement and organizational responses because the topic is sufficiently general to serve as a lens for an array of fundamental organisational issues such as organizational culture and identity and the development and execution of strategy. For example, focusing on the broader issue of how the organisation engages and interacts with its diverse set of stakeholders, both internal and external (e.g. customers, employees, shareholders and communities), typically reveals issues surrounding such varied areas as employee morale, conflict, motivation, as well as cohesiveness of overall strategy and effectiveness of execution, to name just a few. Read more

London Business Experience - Design Thinking Module

MBA Programme, London Business School, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, 2015-2017

Course Description: The first aim of the course is to give students an appreciation for leading-edge thinking and practice in innovation. Much of this is about working experientially with users, applying “design” thinking to existing products and services, and prototyping rapidly. The second aim of the course is to take a broader view of innovation than we usually would at a Business School, and consider a range of social challenges that would benefit from being tackled using the principles of innovation. Read more

Core Strategy (MBA)

MBA Programme, London Business School, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, 2013-2019

Course Description: The field of strategy, and this course, attempts to address the central issue in business: why do some firms outperform other firms? It is empirically evident that there are significant profitability differences between industries, and there are significant profitability differences between firms within industries. In the three modules in this course, we will develop an understanding of what underlies such inter-industry and inter-firm profitability differences. Read more

Core Strategy (EMBA)

EMBA Programme, London Business School, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, 2016-2020

Course Description: The field of strategy, and this course, attempts to address the central issue in business: why do some firms outperform other firms? It is empirically evident that there are significant profitability differences between industries, and there are significant profitability differences between firms within industries. In the three modules in this course, we will develop an understanding of what underlies such inter-industry and inter-firm profitability differences. Read more

Digital Strategy (MBA)

MBA Programme, London Business School, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, 2017-2020

Course Description: Many firms now have access to more data than they can process and use. The internet has given them direct access to suppliers and customers. Advancements in artificial intelligence has opened new ways of changing their operations that were unimaginable before. How these trends have changed firms, industries, and institutional foundations upon which firms operate? Digital Strategy course is designed to help you answer this question. Read more

underreviewpapers

Organizing for Innovation: How Team Configurations Vary With Modularity and Breadth of Application

Co-author(s): Sarah Kaplan (UofT)

2nd R&R in Strategic Management Journal, 2019

While innovation has increasingly become a collaborative effort, there is little consensus in research about what types of team configurations might be the most useful for creating breakthrough innovations. Do teams need to include inventors with knowledge breadth for recombination or do they need inventors with knowledge depth for identifying anomalies? Do teams need overlapping knowledge to integrate insights from diverse areas or does this redundancy hamper innovation by creating inefficiencies? In this paper… Read more

Detrimental Collaborations in Creative Work: Evidence from Economics

Co-author(s): Florenta Teodoridis (USC), Michael Bikard (LBS)

Under review in Organization Science, 2019

Prior research on collaboration and creativity has mostly assumed that individuals choose to collaborate because collaboration positively contributes to output quality. In this paper, we argue that collaboration conceals individual contributions, and that the presence of a collaboration credit premium—when the sum of fractional credits allocated to each collaborator exceeds 100%—might motivate individuals to collaborate even when their collaboration hurts output quality. We test our argument… Read more

workingpapers