Strategy

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%.

At a recent Columbia Business School gathering focused on cement decarbonisation, Maher Al-Haffar, chief financial officer at Cemex, one of the world’s largest cement companies, had a message for his peers: “There’s a misconception that for any emitting industry, the cost of transition is value-destructive to shareholders,” he said. “In our industry, we actually think it’s value-creating.”

With multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly taking public stances on sociopolitical issues such as immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and racism, it is imperative that International Business (IB) research keeps pace with normative societal debates. In this paper, we introduce the concept of corporate sociopolitical activism (SPA) to the IB literature and develop theory on why MNCs consistently or inconsistently engage in SPA in response to the same issue in their home country and a host country.

This paper investigates the short-run effects of platform market concentration on advertising prices, leveraging the temporary outage of TikTok in the U.S. in January 2025 as a quasi-exogenous shock to advertising demand and supply on competing social media platforms. While increased advertiser demand on other platforms would raise prices, more impression opportunities from users substituting to those platforms would lower prices, creating opposing forces on ad prices.

We examine how the seemingly arbitrary way a prompt is posed, which we term “prompt architecture,” influences responses provided by large language models (LLMs). Five large-scale, full-factorial experiments performing standard (zero-shot) similarity evaluation tasks using GPT-3, GPT-4, and Llama 3.1 document how several features of prompt architecture (order, label, framing, and justification) interact to produce methodological artifacts, a form of statistical bias.

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.

Firms with political connections to a regime with an authoritarian history face a dilemma when the regime undergoes a democratic transition. Such connections provide an essential competitive advantage when the regime is in power but become a liability when an institutional transition brings democratic change. This study theorizes that when mass protests expose a regime’s distorted policies favoring elites over others and signal a high probability of regime turnover, firms may hedge against the risks associated with their political connections by engaging in philanthropy.

Why do frontier technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) diffuse unequally across geographies? While prior work attributes this trend to demand-side factors like complementary assets, we theorize that technology entrepreneurs' strategic choice to target hub markets creates search frictions for firms outside of those markets, contributing to lower technology adoption.