Over the past few decades, entrepreneurship has experienced significant growth in both academic research and education.

Dean Emeritus Glenn Hubbard, the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, was one of the early Columbia Business School leaders who foresaw this trend. He began advocating for entrepreneurship scholarship and curriculum development as early as the 1990s.

Entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role in fostering job creation, enhancing productivity growth, and driving innovation. These factors, in turn, are the foundational drivers of US competitiveness.

In his welcome message to the CBS community last fall, Dean Costis Maglaras celebrated the increasing influence of the School’s scholarship in the realms of change, innovation, and disruption. The strength and growing interest in research in these areas reflects CBS’s priorities around driving entrepreneurship and innovation from every angle.

Learn more about the latest CBS research in innovation and entrepreneurship, led by our exceptional faculty members.

Entrepreneurship

Jorge Guzman | Gantcher Associate Professor of Business

Over the course of his career, Professor Guzman has contributed to the Boston startup ecosystem and served as an advisor to both startups and regional and national policy agencies. A prolific scholar, his research focuses on entrepreneurship policy, regional entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial strategy. His recent work includes the “Startup Cartography Project: Measuring and Mapping Entrepreneurial Ecosystems” (Research Policy, 2022); “Go West Young Firm: The Impact of Startup Migration on the Performance of Migrants” (Management Science, 2023); “Climate Change Framing and Innovator Attention: Evidence from an Email Field Experiment” (Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, 2023); and “The Direct Effect of Corporate Law on Entrepreneurship” (The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations, 2022).

Nataliya L. Wright I Assistant Professor

Professor Wright’s research focuses on international entrepreneurial strategy, with special interest in how startups scale and variations in scaling around the globe. In her recent work, “Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship” (Research Policy, 2023), Wright and her team show that the use of open source software can be a lever for stimulating tech entrepreneurial founding in countries around the world. And in another recent study, “Judging Foreign Startups” (Strategic Management Journal, 2023), Wright and her co-authors show that potentially one in 20 promising startups are passed over by accelerators because they are headquartered outside the accelerator judges’ home region.

Finance

Michael Ewens | David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance

Co-director of the Columbia Business School Private Equity Program and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Professor Ewens is an expert on entrepreneurial finance, both in patterns of financing and in the impact of venture capital and private equity on companies. In his recent paper, “Race and Gender in Entrepreneurial Finance” (Handbook of the Economics of Corporate Finance, Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance, 2023), Professor Ewens and his team show patterns of bias against underrepresented founders in the field. And in the paper “Private or Public Equity? The Evolving Entrepreneurial Finance Landscape” (Annual Review of Financial Economics, 2022), he and his co-author study changes in the tradeoffs between going public and staying private.

Innovation

Melanie Brucks | Assistant Professor of Business

Professor Brucks is a specialist in understanding how marketers can maximize productivity and fuel innovation. Her research focuses on the processes behind the evolution of innovative ideas and on the impact of technological innovations on cognitive behaviors. In a recent study of new applications for artificial intelligence, conducted with CBS Professor Olivier Toubia (“Prompt Architecture Can Induce Methodological Artifacts in Large Language Models,” SSRN 2023), Brucks and Toubia show that the structure of prompts, such as the order or labeling of options, creates bias in OpenAI’s GPT-4 evaluations. In the paper “Virtual Communication Curbs Creative Idea Generation” (Nature, 2022), Brucks and her co-author, Jonathan Levav, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, demonstrate the negative impact of video-conferencing on idea generation.

Sheena Iyengar | S.T. Lee Professor of Business 

Professor Iyengar is a world expert on choice and decision-making. Her new book, Think Bigger: How to Innovate (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2023), focuses on idea generation, looking at methods for taking advantage of lessons learned from neurological and cognitive science to generate good ideas. Iyengar spoke at the inaugural Think Bigger Innovations Summit, supported by CBS think tank The Hub last spring, and she teaches the Innovation Salon at CBS, a forum for students, alumni, faculty, and Innovation Fellows to discuss how to address current issues facing innovation.

Gita Johar | Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business

Specializing in the impact of AI on consumers, Professor Johar and her team have measured human behavior and rates of AI adoption. In her paper “Meaning of Manual Labor Impedes Consumer Adoption of Autonomous Products” (Journal of Marketing, 2023), Johar and colleagues link the reward people find in completing manual tasks and their lack of interest in autonomous products. The researchers’ findings suggest companies have to find ways to offset the detriments of autonomous products with meaningful experiences for consumers.

Frank Lichtenberg | Cain Brothers & Company Professor of Healthcare Management

An advisor to US government agencies and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Professor Lichtenberg studies how new technology affects the productivity of companies, industries, and nations. Much of his recent research has explored the effectiveness of new innovation in healthcare delivery. His paper “The Impact of Biomedical Innovation on the Disability of Elderly Medicare Recipients, 2013-2019” (Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 2023) is one of his many studies in this area. His other work includes papers on innovation of medical care and its use and on the effect of pharmaceutical innovation on longevity.

Olivier Toubia | Glaubinger Professor of Business

With decades of experience exploring innovation, Professor Toubia offers a unique perspective on the field as it increasingly adopts artificial intelligence. His introductory chapter with co-author K. Sudhir, “The State of AI Research in Marketing: Active, Fertile, and Ready for Explosive Growth,” in the book he and Professor Sudhir co-edited, Review of Marketing Research, vol. 20 (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2023), provides insight into the research underway in this emerging discipline. In other work, Toubia focuses on various aspects of innovation, including preference measurement and idea generation. Specifically, he combines methods from social sciences and data science to study human processes such as motivation, choice, and creativity.

Intrapreneurship

Wei Cai | Assistant Professor of Business

A scholar of innovative management, Professor Cai examines how corporate leaders and managers can deliberately design and shape organizational culture and improve organizational outcomes through innovative management control systems. Her paper “Pay-For-Performance and Innovative Thinking” (Strategic Finance, 2023) examines the role compensation contracts play in employee-initiated innovation (EII) activities, and her paper “Incentive Contract Design and Employee-Initiated Innovation: Evidence from the Field” (Contemporary Accounting Research, 2022) shows that variable pay contracts deincentivize engagement in broad-scope EII.