Entrepreneurship & Innovation

We quantify the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on firm productivity through a series of large-scale randomized field experiments involving millions of users and products at a leading cross-border online retail platform. Over six months in 2023-2024, GenAI-based enhancements were integrated into seven consumer-facing business workflows. We find that GenAI adoption significantly increases sales, with treatment effects ranging from 0% to 16.3%, depending on GenAI’s marginal contribution relative to existing firm practices.

The International Space Station United States National Laboratory has spearheaded space experimentation since 2005. This study assesses the impact of these experiments by linking NASA’s log records to scholarly publications and patent inventions. Several key findings are documented. First, the volume of space experiments has steadily increased, with notable contributions from commercial developers and investigators. Growth accelerated in 2012 following the formation of The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space.

This study assesses the impact of corporate accelerators on startup growth and technology adoption. Corporate accelerator programs offer technological resources that can spur startup growth, but they can also deter startups from exploring other suppliers' technologies. With novel data from one technology firm's accelerator program, we compare accepted and rejected startups using a machine-learning-based matching algorithm trained on the selection criteria. Participating in the corporate accelerator increases startups’ future funding by more than 50%.

We examine how a startup's strategic positioning—specifically, whether it communicates a disruptive or collaborative stance toward incumbents—affects its ability to attract talent. Although prior research has examined how this positioning influences investors, its impact on potential employees remains less clear. We conduct a field experiment with an early-stage climate technology startup in India, randomly assigning job seekers to a disruptive or collaborative positioning condition.

We investigate whether the diseases for which there was more biomedical innovation had larger 1999–2019 reductions in premature mortality. Biomedical innovation related to a disease is measured by the change in the mean vintage of descriptors of PubMed articles about the disease. We analyze data on 286 million descriptors of 27 million articles about over 800 diseases. Premature mortality from a disease is significantly inversely related to the lagged vintage of descriptors of articles about the disease.

We aim to stimulate discussion on how innovation research within marketing can use a better world (BW) perspective to help innovation become a driver of positive change in the world. In this "Challenging the Boundaries" series paper, we hope to provide purposeful research opportunities for scholars seeking to bridge innovation research with the BW movement. We frame our discussion with four areas of innovation research in marketing that are particularly relevant to BW objectives.