Research Seminar with Kevin Boudreau

This is a hybrid event – join us in person or online!

Dr. Kevin Boudreau will present a talk entitled “Knowledge Diversity & Innovation Performance: Field Experimental Evidence from Internet-of-Things Product Innovation.” Kevin is the Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Sprott School of Business for 2022-2023, and an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Northeastern University.

Description

Although there is much discussion of the role of diversity of knowledge in innovation teams, there is little empirical research that documents causal effects on innovation performance. To make progress, we report on a field experiment involving 872 US college-educated adults randomly assigned to 218 teams of 4 who are tasked with designing and developing new services based on Internet-of-Things technologies. We find that overall innovation solution quality depends most clearly on group members being from fields with directly relevant knowledge to the problem at hand (engineering, computer science, design, and business). However, the effects also depend on the specific configuration of knowledge. Most notably, “balanced” teams of 2-and-2 from related knowledge fields outperform other configurations by a wide margin. Moreover, having just one person from a given field related to the problem has no statistical effect; more than one is required to bring about systematic improvements of performance.

Biography

Kevin Boudreau studies how to optimize business models and the organization of digital platforms and digital organizational infrastructure. Much of his work involves analysis of large data sets and collaboration with platform engineers and data scientists to embed experiments within “live” working platforms. He has degrees in Engineering (Waterloo), Economics (Toronto), and Behavioral and Policy Sciences (MIT). His research has been generously funded by the Fulbright Foundation, G. E. Corp., Google, the Kaufmann Foundation, Microsoft, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Paris Chamber of Commerce, and the Sloan Foundation.

Please RSVP if you will be attending in-person luncheon for Sprott attendees at 11:30 a.m.

If you are joining us virtually, please use the Zoom link to connect on the day of the event. No advance registration is required.