Stine Grodal is Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University D'Amore-McKim School of Business in the department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She received her PhD from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering. Grodal has developed and delivered classes globally on innovation, strategy and design thinking to undergraduates, graduate students and executives. Her research examines the emergence and evolution of markets and industries. She is especially interested in how firms can shape and exploit the socio-cognitive elements of markets. Her research has received numerous awards including the EGOS Best Paper Award and the TIM Best Paper Award. Her work has been published in both management and sociology journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and American Sociological Review. Her work has also been published in practitioner oriented journals such as MIT Sloan Management Review and IESE Insight. Grodal is committed to research methods. She is known for her expertise in using interviews, ethnography and in-depth archival research, which she combines with quantitative analyses and online experiments when appropriate.

Website: https://damore-mckim.northeastern.edu/people/stine-grodal/

Professor Lifshitz-Assaf’s research focuses on developing an in-depth empirical and theoretical understanding of the micro-foundations of scientific and technological innovation and knowledge creation processes in the digital age. She explores how the ability to innovate is being transformed, as well as the challenges and opportunities the transformation means for R&D organizations, professionals and their work. Her recent work on AI for critical decisions the ISSIP Excellence in Service innovation award (2023) and two best paper awards (from the Management Information Systems Quarterly journal and from the Association for Information Systems, 2022). Her first field study was an in-depth 3-year longitudinal field study of NASA’s experimentation with open innovation online platforms and communities, resulting in a scientific breakthrough. This study received the best dissertation Grigor McClelland Award at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) 2015, Best Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) paper based on dissertation (2018) and Best published paper elected by organizational communication and information systems division of Academy of Management (2018).She investigates new forms of organizing for the production of scientific and technological innovation such as crowdsourcing, open source, open online innovation communities, Wikipedia, hackathons, makeathons and AI based innovation processes. Her work received the prestigious INSPIRE grant from the National Science Foundation and was recognized to have a strong impact on the industry; She received the Industry Studies Association Frank Giarrantani Rising Star award and the Industry Research Institute grant for research on R&D.

Prior to academia, Professor Lifshitz-Assaf worked as a strategy consultant for seven years, specializing in growth and innovation strategy in telecommunications, consumer goods and finance.

Website: https://www.hilalifshitz.com/

Andrew Nelson is a professor in the Department of Management at the Lundquist College of Business and the Randall C. Papé Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Nelson's research explores technology, entrepreneurship, and occupations and has been featured in leading journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science, as well as in national media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR.

Nelson received his PhD in management science and engineering from Stanford University, where he subsequently served on the faculty. He also holds an MS with distinction from Oxford University and a BA with honors and distinction from Stanford University.

As an award-winning instructor, Nelson leads undergraduate, MBA, PhD, and executive education courses in entrepreneurship and organization theory. In collaboration with colleagues from Stanford University and the University of California at Davis, he also is the author of Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise, published by McGraw-Hill, which is now in its fifth edition and used in entrepreneurship courses worldwide.

Website: https://business.uoregon.edu/directory/faculty-staff/all/ajnelson

Arvind Karunakaran is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Management Science and Engineering. He is a Core faculty of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization (WTO), Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), and a faculty affiliate of the Stanford Institute for Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the Digital Economy Lab (DEL).

His research draws on organizational theory and sociology of work and occupations/professions to examine authority and accountability in the workplace, especially in the context of technological change. He received his Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management. His current research focuses on understanding (a) tensions among the overlapping strands of authority in organizations (e.g., line authority, staff authority, professional authority), and how it shapes consequential outcomes such as exclusion/inclusion in the workplace, perceptions of powerlessness, employee voice and change implementation; (b) mechanisms for enforcing accountability during periods of organizational and technological changes (e.g., introduction of Generative AI and algorithmic evaluation tools).

He specializes in ethnographic and field-based methods (e.g., participant observations, interviews), examining the empirical and theoretical puzzles discovered during fieldwork that existing research cannot fully explain. He complements these methods with comparative-historical analysis of primary archival data and quantitative/computational analysis of large-corpus of textual data.

His research has been published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Annals, Research Policy, and Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and recognized with awards from professional associations such as the American Sociological Association (ASA), Academy of Management (AOM), Industry Studies Association (ISA), Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA).

Website: https://engineering.stanford.edu/people/arvind-karunakaran

Professor is a professor of both the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Professor and the Department of Management Studies at Aalto University. Henri is interested in how technologies and human behavior interact. Henri Schildt is currently teaching and writing a book on digital strategies and data-driven management. He is also the principal investigator in Academy of Finland funded project studying how social enterprises and NGOs work with refugees to counter marginalization. His on-going research interests include strategic change, strategy processes, and organizational cognition.

Website: https://research.aalto.fi/en/persons/henri-schildt

Zilber is an expert in organization theory. Her research, informed by anthropology, focuses on how individuals, groups, and organizations come together to create a shared reality that they experience as given and how they maintain or change this social world. She uses Institutional Theory to understand how broad social meanings – e.g., feminism in the context of a rape crisis center, Modernism in the context of Israeli high-tech, capitalism in the context of CEO compensation in the USA, and science in the context of academic research – influence organizations and are influenced by them. Her studies are based on qualitative methodologies such as ethnography, narrative, and discourse analysis; and span various levels of analysis, including the individual, organization, field, and society.

Prof. Zilber has served as a Research Fellow at the University of Gothenburg and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and the University of California San Diego. She is a part-time full professor at the Copenhagen Business School. She co-authored the books Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation (Sage) and Peace Entrepreneurs and Social Entrepreneurship: Life Stories from Israel and Palestine (Edward Elgar). Zilber’s research has been published, among other outlets, in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Inquiry, Organization Studies, Organization Science, Organization Theory, Organizational Research Methods, Qualitative Inquiry, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations.

Zilber recently won the Hebrew University Rector Prize for Excellence in Research, Teaching, and Service. Students have also elected her 15 times for the Outstanding Teacher Award. She is co-editor-in-chief of Organization Studies, served as Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal, and has been elected twice to the board of the European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS).

Zilber’s most recent research focuses on how we are allowed to die and how societal-level understanding of the “good life” and “good death” shape and organize the end of life. She teaches an MBA course titled “For Life and Death Are One: Institutional Dynamics at the End of Life.”

Website: https://bschool-en.huji.ac.il/tammar-zilber

Sarah Kaplan is Founding Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE), Distinguished Professor of Gender & the Economy, Professor of Strategic Management and Fellow of the Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She is a co-author of the bestselling business book, Creative Destruction as well as Survive and Thrive: Winning Against Strategic Threats to Your Business. Her latest book, The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation is based on her award-winning course at the Rotman School. In it, she shows companies how to avoid simple “greenwashing” or “pinkwashing” in addressing corporate social responsibility and gender equity. She lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them.

Her current work focuses on applying an innovation lens to understanding the challenges for achieving gender equality and other social goods. She regularly advises corporations, governments and agencies on policies related to environmental, social and governance issues such as board diversity, board governance, care work, employment, pay equity, gender-based analysis and other topics. As a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, Professor Kaplan has dedicated her work to supporting women and people who belong to all marginalized groups.

She collaborated with Peter Dey on the 2021 report “Governance 360º: Where are the directors in a world in crisis?” which provides guidelines for boards of directors to navigate the challenges of the 21st century. In 2020, she was strategic lead on the GATE/YWCA “Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Canada.” She has received the Peter Dey Governance Achievement Award from the Governance Professionals of Canada and was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women Executive Network.

Formerly a professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (where she remains a Senior Fellow), and a consultant and innovation specialist for nearly a decade at McKinsey & Company in New York, she completed her doctoral research at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has a BA with honors in Political Science from UCLA and an MA in International Relations and International Economics with distinction from the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Website: https://discover.research.utoronto.ca/14724-sarah-kaplan

Judith Clair’s research focuses on demographic/social identities (e.g., race, gender, social class) and inequalities in the workplace; on development and transitions in professional identities; and on positive organizational experiences such as hope and positive growth. Her gender- and diversity-focused research includes experiences of “cross-domain” identity change in first-time pregnant professional women; how social class background shapes how women understand their advancement into top organizational positions; how benevolent sexism during pregnancy effects workplace retention of women post-pregnancy; how professional women in STEM fields define and experience benefits from others’ inclusive leadership practices; and how individuals with invisible stigmatized identities manage those identities in the workplace.

Professor Clair is also recognized for her contributions to research on how organizations can effectively manage crises and critical events to minimize harm and to facilitate positive growth, as well as her work on teaching pedagogy and the peer-review process. Her publications appear in the top journals in Management and Applied Psychology, including the Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Personnel Psychology, and Academy of Management Learning and Education. Clair has received national and university teaching awards. She has taught courses on organizational behavior, leadership, gender, and multicultural diversity, equity and inclusion in organizations. She has taught courses at the undergraduate, MBA, PhD, and executive levels.

Website: https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/carroll-school/faculty-research/faculty-directory/judith-clair.html

Julia DiBenigno is an organizational ethnographer and field researcher. Her current work explores mechanisms of cooperation, change, and influence in the context of improving Army mental healthcare for active-duty U.S. soldiers. Professor DiBenigno’s prior work examined the effects of cross-cutting demographics on collaboration between nurses and patient care technicians. Her research has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Annals.

In her work, Professor DiBenigno seeks to understand occupational and organizational dynamics that affect important outcomes, from whether a nurse ignores or answers a patient call for help in the night to whether a soldier suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) receives mental healthcare with the full support of his or her commander. She specializes in qualitative, ethnographic methodologies (e.g., observation and interviewing). Using these methods, Professor DiBenigno immerses herself in the social worlds of those she studies to develop novel theories by focusing on empirical puzzles discovered during fieldwork which existing organizational theory cannot explain.

Professor DiBenigno received her PhD and MS in Work and Organization Studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a consultant for Deloitte’s Organization and Change practice and received a BA in psychology from Columbia College.

Website: https://som.yale.edu/faculty-research/faculty-directory/julia-dibenigno

Paul Leonardi, Ph.D., is Department Chair and Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara. He holds appointments in the Department of Technology Management and the Department of Communication.

Dr. Leonardi’s research, teaching, and consulting focus on helping companies to create and share knowledge more effectively. He is interested in how implementing new technologies and harnessing the power of informal social networks can help companies take advantage of their knowledge assets to create innovative products and services. He is an expert on digital transformation. 

He has authored more than 70 articles that have appeared in top journals across the fields of Management, Communication, and Information Systems. He also publishes his work for managers and executives in outlets such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. He is the author of four books on technological innovation and organizational change.

Website: https://tmp.ucsb.edu/people/paul-leonardi

Stine Grodal is Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University D'Amore-McKim School of Business in the department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She received her PhD from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering. Grodal has developed and delivered classes globally on innovation, strategy and design thinking to undergraduates, graduate students and executives. Her research examines the emergence and evolution of markets and industries. She is especially interested in how firms can shape and exploit the socio-cognitive elements of markets. Her research has received numerous awards including the EGOS Best Paper Award and the TIM Best Paper Award. Her work has been published in both management and sociology journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and American Sociological Review. Her work has also been published in practitioner oriented journals such as MIT Sloan Management Review and IESE Insight. Grodal is committed to research methods. She is known for her expertise in using interviews, ethnography and in-depth archival research, which she combines with quantitative analyses and online experiments when appropriate.

Website: https://damore-mckim.northeastern.edu/people/stine-grodal/