Many firms rely on their suppliers as a major source of innovation, and they harness the innovation potential of their supplier base by organizing procurement (or innovation) contests. Extant research on contests has mostly assumed that suppliers compete on even grounds in a procurement contest....

Creative stars make disproportionately influential contributions to their fields. Yet we know little about how an innovator’s creative performance is affected by collaborating with stars. This paper studies the creative aspects of interpersonal collaboration from a new perspective: the quality...

Problem Definition: Is teamwork better than working alone for creating breakthrough inventions? We challenge the widely accepted affirmative answer to this question.Academic/Practical Relevance: Extant research has consistently found that lone inventors significantly underperform teams in...

It is well established that returns to spending on research and development are positive and accrue over several years — that is, firms benefit from higher levels of cumulative R&D spending. We study how a given amount of such spending is best allocated, over time, to optimize R&D performance....

Products combine function and form. This paper focuses on product form. The authors combine state-of-the-art clustering techniques with experimental validation to identify styles (groupings of new product designs of similar form) among the more than 350,000 US design patents granted from 1977...

We examine how the architecture of products relates to their quality. Using an architectural representation that accounts for both the hierarchical and dependency relationships between modules and components, we define a new construct, system cyclicality. System cyclicality recognizes component...