Events

Moderation: Jörg Hoffmann

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Raum E10

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 101

When preparing a research article, academics engage in informal intellectual collaboration by asking other academics for feedback, which gives rise to a social network. We study whether informal intellectual collaboration with an academic who is more central in this social network results in a research article having higher scientific impact. To identify the effect of centrality changes of the most central commenter acknowledged on an article, we exploit deaths of scholars occurring somewhere in the network. We show that citation count increases by 1 citation if the most central commenter on the average article increases her Bonacich centrality by 2%. The effect is mediated by a decay in importance of more distance connections and robust to different network definitions.
To illustrate our results, we develop a structural model in which a positive externality from intellectual collaboration implies that collaborating with a more central colleague results in larger scientific impact of the research article.

Contact person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Moderation: Michael Neumann

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 101

Max Planck Institut for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

In this paper, we begin with a review of the venture capital (VC) literature. We then briefly present mixed methods research, which combines quantitative and qualitative data and exploratory and confirmatory analysis in one study, and an illustrative study on VC learning. We then suggest mixed methods-related directions for future VC research, addressing gaps in the relational, learning, and related aspects under research stream, and presenting a cross-disciplinary mixed methods-related approach. Lastly, we provide a short critical discussion on both methods and research practices. In doing so, we hope to stimulate entrepreneurship scholars’ interest in these underutilized methods.

Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

We explore how firms frame catastrophic innovation failure for external audiences. Failure events may lead external audiences to doubt the firm’s ultimate chances of success. Because it is difficult for those audiences to ascertain whether the failure occurred due to the uncertainty inherent to innovation (experimentation uncertainty) or due to managerial or organizational shortcomings (execution uncertainty), a firm’s own framing of the failure may critically influence external audiences’ interpretations. We analyze three cases of catastrophic innovation failure at two firms in the private space industry - SpaceX and Virgin Galactic—using market-facing communications, including social media, blogs, corporate websites, press releases, and news articles. We find that firms frame catastrophic innovation failure considering

(1) the extent to which they incorporated the notion of failure into their external narrative prior to the failure, and

(2) the nature of the catastrophic event itself. We identify a tension inherent to the crafting of organizational narratives for innovating firms, between promising success (which elicits external audiences’ support) and acknowledging the possibility of failure (which may deter them). Our findings indicate a need for innovating firms to weave a sense of ‘optimal promise’ into their external narratives, balancing the zeal of success with the possibility of failure.

Contact Person: Zhaoxin Pu

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

This paper investigates how a major mental disorder - bipolar disorder - affects people’s careers. Individual-level registry data for the population of Denmark allows us examine variation in mental health diagnoses, prescriptions, and earnings for 2.5 million people born between 1946 and 1975. These data show that people with bipolar disorder earn 32 percent less than the overall population and 36 percent less than their siblings. To examine the effects of mental health treatments, we exploit the introduction of lithium as a targeted treatment for bipolar disorder in 1976. Baseline difference-in-differences regressions compare career penalties of mental disorder for people who had access to treatment when they turned 20 with people who did not have access. OLS estimates indicate that access to treatment led to a 30 percent reduction in the earnings penalty (from 32 to 22 percent). A major policy concern is that mental health disorders – and differential access to treatment – may exacerbate inequality. To investigate this issue, we estimate differential effects of bipolar disorder and access to treatment across the earnings distribution. This analysis reveals a dramatic differential effect of mental health – and treatments – on low end of the earnings distribution. In the lowest 10 percent of the earnings distribution, people with bipolar disorder earn 82 percent less than the overall population. Access to treatment closes this gap almost completely, by 89 percent (from 82 to 73 percent).

Contact Person: Zhaoxin Pu

Moderated by Moritz Suttner

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competiton, room E 10

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Professional bibliometrics is characterized by using field-normalized indicators for research evaluation. Citation rates differ by field (independently of the papers’ quality) and these differences should be considered in cross-field comparisons (e.g. of universities). In the first part of the presentation, the standard field-normalization approaches are explained. Several examples are presented of how field-normalized scores can be used for research evaluation. In the second part of the presentation, some current research projects and recently developed tools in the area of bibliometrics are shown.

Full paper

Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

This paper studies how early stage entrepreneurs learn about the quality of their ventures. I assess the effect of negative feedback on abandonment using application and judging data from 87 new venture competitions, 34 of which privately informed founders of their relative rank. I use a difference-in-differences design and matching estimators to compare lower and higher ranked losers, across competitions in which they did and did not observe their standing. Receiving negative feedback increased venture abandonment by about 13 percent. The effect occurs quickly, doubles among women founders, and increases with signal precision. It decreases with venture maturity and riskiness.

Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler