Technology and Innovation Commons^™

Bank Competition Amid Digital Disruption: Implications For Financial Inclusion, Erica Xuewei Jiang, Gloria Yang Yu, Jinyuan Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine how digital disruption affects bank competition using the staggered rollout of 3G mobile networks. 3G expansion increased mobile banking adoption among tech-savvy households, reducing branch networks—especially in younger counties. Banks' strategies diverged: Less branch-reliant banks closed branches and competed on price, while more branch-reliant banks maintained branches but raised spreads. A structural model shows that perceived digital service improvements among younger consumers drove these shifts, reducing welfare for older savers. Counterfactuals demonstrate that subsidizing adoption for older savers can cost-effectively reduce these disparities, facilitating a smoother digital transition.

Patent Regime Shift And Firm Innovation Strategy: Evidence From The Second Amendment To China's Patent Law, Tony W. Tong, Wenlong He, Liang Chen, Zi-Lin He, Jiangyong Lu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: While changes in intellectual property rights (IPR) protection significantly shape firm innovation, the mechanisms driving firms' responses remain poorly understood. Leveraging the Second Amendment to China's Patent Law, which strengthens appropriability particularly for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as a natural experiment, we show that stronger IPR has mixed effects on SOEs' innovation. While SOEs increase the rate of innovation subsequent to the Amendment, they shift the direction of innovation toward more familiar areas in which they face a lesser need to adjust existing routines. This directional change suggests a quality decline in SOEs' innovation that may be attributed to …

Operational Agency: A Permeable Legal Fiction For Tracing Culpability In Ai Systems, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems act with a high degree of independence yet lack legal personhood—a paradox that fractures doctrines grounded in human-centric notions of mens rea and actus reus. This Article introduces Operational Agency (OA)—a permeable legal fiction structured as an ex post evidentiary framework—and Operational Agency Graph (OAG)—a tool for mapping causal interactions among human actors, organizations, and AI systems. OA evaluates an AI’s observable operational characteristics: its goal-directedness (as a proxy for intent), predictive processing (as a proxy for foresight), and safety architecture (as a proxy for standard of care). OAG operationalizes that analysis by embedding these …

Keeping Up With The Times? Rethinking Social Evaluations Research Under Contemporary Technological And Sociopolitical Forces, Marco Clemente, Michael Etter, Yuliya Snihur, Gokhan Ertug, Graffin Scott, Anastasiya Zavyalova

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The context within which social evaluations form has been fundamentally altered by contemporary forces, such as digital technologies, polarization, activism, politicization of business, and geopolitical tensions. While research on social evaluations has generated rich insights into the formation and development of constructs, such as legitimacy, status, reputation, stigma, trust, and celebrity, much of this work has been developed under the assumptions of relative stability, coherent audiences, and well-defined intermediary roles. These assumptions are increasingly challenged in this changing context, requiring us to rethink the formation and management of social evaluations. The articles in this special issue focus on these changes. …

Moving Beyond Entry Modes: Toward A New Paradigm Of International Involvement In An Era Of Digitalization And Global Transitions, Noman Shaheer, Sali Li, Liang Chen, Keith D. Brouthers, Dan Li, Peter Liesch

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We seek to reconceptualize internationalization strategy by shifting focus from static, single-entry mode choices to dynamic constellations of multiple involvement modes. In an era of rapid technological change enabled by artificial intelligence, blockchain, and robotics, geopolitical volatility fueled by trade wars and violent conflicts, and increasing sustainability demands, multinational corporations (MNCs) need to rethink how they are involved with diverse stakeholder expectations, prioritize flexibility and reversibility, and embed co-creation and legitimacy alongside efficiency. Extending Brouthers et al. (2022), we integrate transaction cost economics with resource-based, institutional, opportunity, and ecosystem perspectives to explain how MNCs configure and reconfigure various constellations of …

Technological Strategy Paths, Dynamic Capability And Innovation Performance In Complex Product Industries: A Mechanism Study Based On China’S New Energy Vehicle Industry, Fan Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In recent years, the new energy vehicle (NEV) industry has developed rapidly, moving from electrification toward an intelligent phase characterized by software-defined vehicles. NEV firms pursue product and technological innovation through diverse strategic paths, including internal research and development, collaborative development, and platform-based development, yet their innovation performance varies. Most extant research focuses on the industry level, offering limited insight into how, at the firm level, different technological paths shape the innovation outcomes through firms’ dynamic capabilities. It still remains unclear whether and how these relationships among paths, capabilities, and innovation outcomes differ across technological domains.

This study adopts a …

From Catching Up To Surpassing—A Multi-Case Study Of Chinese Latecomer Technology Firms, Baohua Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In recent years, a number of Chinese latecomer technology firms have grown rapidly and, in some cases, have even moved into leading positions in global competition. As global competition is being reshaped, technologies are evolving more rapidly, and traditional catch-up paths are becoming less viable, how these Chinese latecomer technology firms catch up with leading incumbents has become an important issue in strategic management research. Drawing on the theoretical lens of asymmetrical competition, resource orchestration, and dynamic capabilities, this study adopts an Eisenhardt-style multiple-case design to conduct a longitudinal comparative analysis of six firms—Insta360, Dreame, DJI, Unitree, Transsion, and Royole—and …

The Impact Of R&D Team Diversity On Ambidextrous Innovation In Srdi Smes, Cheng Zhan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

As a vital organizational form of R&D teams in specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative (SRDI) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), distributed teams have gradually emerged as a dynamic source of innovation for such enterprises. Against the backdrop of the (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) era, markets have imposed higher demands on enterprises' innovative and sustainable development capabilities, exerting substantial impacts on the growth of SRDI SMEs. Although the distributed R&D team model, developed through continuous exploration in=132=132enterprises' innovation practices, has drawn practical and scholarlyattention for its role in shaping ambidextrous innovation in SRDI SMEs, the internal mechanism underlying the relationship …

The Impact Of Corporate Venture Capital On Financing And Innovation In Academic Entrepreneurial Firms, Tingting Luo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Amid the ongoing advancement of China’s innovation-driven development strategy, the effective transformation of scientific research into industrial impact has become a central concern. Corporate Venture Capital (CVC), as a strategic investment mechanism connecting industrial capital with entrepreneurial ventures, is increasingly viewed as a critical external resource for high-technology start-ups. At the same time, Academic Entrepreneurship Firms (AEFs), characterized by their deep research capabilities and original technological trajectories, play a distinctive role as knowledge suppliers in uncertain, emerging industries. However, whether AEFs can effectively attract CVC support and convert it into innovation performance remains an open empirical and theoretical question.

This …

The Impact Of Genai Guidance Strategies On Employee Ai Acceptance: A Field Experiment Based On Private Domain Marketing, Mai Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

As a novel technological instrument for content production and customer communication, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has garnered significant attention for its value in private domain marketing. However, enterprises frequentlyencounter a paradox of high initial introduction rates coupled with a lackof substantive application. Employee apprehensions regarding the qualityof AI-generated content (AIGC) and organizational guidance strategies are critical factors impeding the realization of technological value. Drawing upon the technologyacceptance model (TAM), the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology(UTAUT), and the task-technology fit (TTF), the study constructs a theoretical model positioning corporate AI guidance strategies as the independent variable andemployee AI …

How Product Innovation And Process Innovation Impact Product Performance, Wei Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In an increasingly competitive global market characterized by accelerating technological iteration and rapidly evolving consumer demands, innovation has become a critical means for firms to adapt to dynamic changes and achieve competitive advantage. Grounded in dynamic capabilities theory and the resource-based view, this study empirically investigates the mechanisms through which product innovation and process innovation affect product performance, drawing on survey data from 215 products. It further examines the mediating role of product flexibility and the moderating effect of product positioning. The results indicate that both product innovation and process innovation have a significant positive impact on product performance. Product …

A Closer Look At The Innovator: The Interplay Between Divergent And Convergent Processes Of Self-Regulation, Ronald Bledow, Hye Jung Eun, Lien Vossaert

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Creativity and innovation are essential for modern organizations. While abundant research has helped to better understand creativity in everyday work life, considerably less attention has been paid to how individuals achieve creative performance during the implementation of innovation projects. We articulate a dialectical interplay between divergent and convergent processes of self-regulation that supports creative performance in innovation projects. We propose that a divergent exploration orientation contributes to creative performance by inducing a broad search for novelty and by stimulating iteration—repeated cycles of experimentation and refinement. Convergent processes of self-regulation—outcome focus and planning—strengthen the relationship between divergent processes and creative performance. …

Collaborative Work Management Technologies And Managerial Intensity In U.S. Corporations: An Examination, Piyush Gulati, Arianna Marchetti, Phanish Puranam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Do digital technologies reinforce managerial hierarchies or, instead, make them less relevant? We propose that the answer to this question depends on the nature of the technology: specifically, its relative impact on managers' capacity to supervise and on subordinates' need for supervision. Applying this framework to collaborative work management (CWM) technologies that facilitate real-time collaboration, communication, and task coordination, we predict that the adoption of such technologies should reduce managerial intensity and increase decentralization in organizations. To test this prediction, we use a difference-in-differences design on a novel data set built from over 26 million job listings (Lightcast) and over …

The Impact Of Innovation Belief On Strategic Product R&D, Yan Zhou

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In highly uncertain innovation scenarios characterized by long R&D cycles and high risks, how to continuously drive enterprises to develop market-competitive blockbuster products has become a critical issue of shared concern in both practice and academia. Existing research has mostly explained differences in blockbuster product R&D from perspectives such as resource allocation, organizational structure, or institutional incentives, while paying insufficient attention to cognitive and belief factors at the individual level. Based on this, this paper introduces the psychological and cognitive variable of "innovative belief" to systematically examine its impact mechanism on blockbuster product R&D capability.

Taking the R&D team of …

Are Cities Losing Innovation Advantages? Online Versus Face-To-Face Interactions, Ruben Gaetani, Naqun Huang, Jing Li, Yanmin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

How did COVID-19 affect the innovation advantages of dense locations? Using data on the universe of U.S. patent applications, we find that the density premium in the production of novel inventions declined by 18.5%-22.9% in 2020-2021 relative to its pre-pandemic level. Smartphone data on local mobility suggest that the drop in the frequency of local interactions can explain a significant portion of this effect. While COVID-19 resulted in a temporary setback in the innovation advantages of dense locations, the role of urban density in facilitating the exchange and recombination of ideas is unlikely to be persistently replaced by online communication.

Modernising Wills For A Smart Nation, Hang Wu Tang, Edward Ti

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Lee Kong Chian Professor of Law Tang Hang Wu and SMU Associate Dean (Undergraduate Curriculum and Teaching) and Associate Professor of Law Edward Ti highlighted that Singapore has digitalised almost everything around the will, but not the will itself. Prof Tang and Assoc Prof Ti noted that the current legislation insists that the will itself remains a paper ritual, which is not just an inconvenience but also risks Singapore’s competitiveness. They argued that Singapore should modernise without compromising on steps to prevent fraud and undue influence. They highlighted that the law should be modernised so that …

Business Schools In The Internal Environment: What Should Schools Do Now?, Kai Peters, Howard Thomas, Michael Thomas

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In our previous article, we set out to explore external factors (Brexit, the pandemic, technological change and nationalism) which have made life more difficult for business schools. In this follow-up, we explore challenges of our own making within business schools, especially those that are a part of a larger university. We posit that many of us are not financially savvy, running too many under-scaled and poorly costed programmes. We see extensive university centralisation and related risk aversion. We see schools scheduling programmes for their own preference, not the preference of students. In conclusion, we propose some ways forward.

Policy Uncertainty Reduces Green Innovation, Mengyu Wang, Jeffrey Wurgler, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Policy uncertainty can undermine the power of government subsidies to stimulate environmentally friendly research and development. We show that Chinese firms’ green R&D falls as the uncertainty of environmental subsidies rises: Exogenous, weather-driven air pollution variability induces subsidies to fluctuate, and firms in areas with high weather-driven subsidy variability undertake less green R&D and hire fewer technical employees, controlling for the average level of subsidies. Heavy emitters and environmental technology firms are more affected. The results also illustrate how policy uncertainty can arise when policymakers are influenced by conditions that are salient but with causes that are difficult to disentangle.

Grand Theft Identity: The Privacy Costs Of Digitalization, Kenny Phua, Chishen Wei, Gloria Yang Yu

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

We study whether greater digital engagement increases the risk of identity theft by exploiting bank branch closures as a shock that shifts economic activity online. Using a quasi-natural experiment, we find causal evidence that branch closures increase identity theft, particularly in more vulnerable communities. Exposed consumers spend more time on mobile apps and shift their expenditures from offline to online channels. Adversarial activities associated with identity theft, such as unwanted calls and phishing attempts, increase after branch closures. Overall, our evidence suggests that digitalization offers consumer benefits, but also imposes hidden privacy costs.

Exploratory Innovation: A New Perspective On Family Firms' Under-Diversification Puzzle, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Sterling Huang, Massimo Massa, Yaru Qian, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose a new perspective on family firms’ puzzling under-diversification in product spaces: these firms first need to succeed in exploratory innovation so they may diversify into new product markets. We construct a large database of family ownership and patent records of U.S. public firms, and show that family firms produce more exploratory patents than others, a relation that is stronger among under-diversified family firms. In addition, we find that such innovation indeed helps family firms diversify business risks. A causal interpretation of our result is supported by (i) using the property division standard in state-level divorce laws as an …

Research On The Influencing Factors Of Bim Technology Adoption In Construction Enterprises, Meng Zhao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The construction industry plays a pivotal role in national economic development, yet it faces significant challenges, including inefficiencies, limited informatization, and fragmented management. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has emerged as a transformative digital technology, offering the potential to revolutionize construction enterprises by enhancing collaboration, reducing costs, and improving project lifecycle management. Despite increasing government support and global advancements, BIM adoption in China, particularly during the construction phase, remains inconsistent and insufficiently explored. This dissertation adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining both qualitative and quantitative research. The qualitative component, through interviews, identifies the primary barriers to BIM adoption during the construction phase, …

How Behavioral Science Can Improve The Return On Ai Investments, David De Cremer, Shane Schweitzer, Jack Mcguire, Devesh Narayanan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many AI projects fail because leaders treat adoption as a tech purchase instead of a behavioral change problem. People resist tools that disrupt routines, overreact to visible AI errors, and prefer familiar human judgment. As a result, even good systems fail to gain purchase. Leaders can address this problem by applying “Behavioral Human-Centered AI” across the AI adoption cycle. In the design phrase, companies should co-design with diverse users, add purposeful friction where it improves scrutiny, require beta tests with subgroup results and behavioral input. During adoption, they should frame AI as an augmenter, disclose limits and safeguards, use explainability …

Technology Discontinuance: A Systematic Literature Review And Research Agenda, Birgit Altrichter, Sabine Benoit

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Technology discontinuance by users who quit digital services such as social media or lose interest in their devices after a few weeks is a common phenomenon. Yet it has received little research attention; the few studies that address it are scattered across disciplines. Research into customer churn is more prevalent, but it implies switching providers rather than halting usage altogether. By moving beyond discipline-based knowledge boundaries and conducting a systematic literature review, the current article proposes a technology discontinuance framework, which details seven technology discontinuance types (overuse, overload, proficiency, disenchantment, social, circumstantial, and solution) and their drivers. For example, guilt …

Internet Of Things In Intralogistics: Applications And Emerging Research, Rene De Koster, Debjit Roy, Yun Fong Lim, Subodha Kumar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Managing the performance of intralogistics operations, that is logistics operations within facilities such as manufacturing plants, order fulfillment warehouses, ports and terminals, and retail stores, is critical in fulfilling customer expectations. Traditional decision-making for intralogistics operations is based on historical data, typically collected over long-range intervals with significant processing delays. However, nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) applications are used to gather detailed real-time data to make dynamic decisions. These new data sources provide challenges and opportunities for operations management. We provide an overview of prominent IoT technologies in four domains: manufacturing, warehousing, ports and terminals, retail, and other emerging areas. …

Managing The Personalization Paradox: Lessons From Spotify’S Ai Dj, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang, Jonathan Wibowo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This case study uses Spotify’s AI DJ to examine the “personalization paradox,” where product features designed to deepen user connection can instead cause alienation. An analysis of over 1,400 user comments identifies three core frictions: a perceived loss of user agency, mismanaged expectations for the human-like AI, and a scalability bottleneck that led to repetitive content. Students are placed in the role of a product manager tasked with developing a prioritized roadmap to address these issues, forcing them to grapple with the critical trade-offs between technological capability and user psychology.

Product Technology Adoption And Aggregate Innovation, Qiugu He, Xuan Luo, Fan Zheng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We document that a firm's research and development (R&D) expenditure depends on its product diversity. Combining with the fact that Chinese manufacturers often enter new product markets via technology adoption, we develop a quantitative framework of innovation and technology adoption, allowing firms to expand their product scopes. Firms adopt technologies across multiple fields to expand their knowledge base, which in turn serves as an input for subsequent innovation or adoption. Counterfactual analysis from the 2000s reveals that two-thirds of knowledge privately held by all firms is generated through adoption, accounting for one-third of aggregate innovation.

Marching To The Beat: The Role Of Complementor Alignment In The Architectural Evolution Of Ecosystems, Pengxiang Zhang, Liang Chen, Yang Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The evolution of innovation ecosystems hinges on the effective coordination between ecosystem leaders and complementors. While ecosystem-sponsored architectural innovations create new technological opportunities for complementors, they may unintentionally disrupt the performance of complementor products that were originally developed based on legacy architectural designs. This study provides empirical evidence of these disruptive effects and explores how complementors’ alignment with the ecosystem leader mitigates such challenges. Focusing on Apple’s release of Core ML—a proprietary artificial intelligence module—in its mobile ecosystem, we employ a difference-in-differences design to investigate variations in complementor performance after adopting this ecosystem-sponsored architectural innovation. Our findings reveal that complementors’ …

The Future Of Higher Education Is Under Siege: Reinvention May Be Its Salvation, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Trust in universities, once a bedrock institution of modern society, is fraying. Affordability, political scrutiny, and cultural divides weigh heavily. Readers are all too aware of the wrenching developments: funding cuts, visa restrictions, pauses in student enrolment processes. These concerns are not confined to US universities only. From Australia to the United Kingdom to South Korea to the Global South, university leaders face parallel strains — affordability, governance, and relevance — and feel the weight of a future under siege.

Banking On Incumbents: How Do Fintech Start-Ups Benefit From Collaborations, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Pia Helbing, Vladimir Pazitka, Dariusz Wojcik, Beiyun Xiao

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We investigate whether collaborations with established incumbents bolster innovation and access to capital for FinTech start-ups. Collaborations increase patent applications and raise both short-and long-term citations. Collaborations with finance incumbents stimulate finance and technology citations and boost both short-and long-horizon venture capital fundraising. These effects persist after addressing endogeneity and conducting additional robustness tests. Theoretically, our findings test the resource based theory in the FinTech ecosystem and enrich the open innovation literature by showing that, despite power asymmetries, FinTech start-ups can sustain innovative momentum and capture innovation gains via collaborations with incumbents. Collaborations function as credible signals that confer capital …

What Values Best Distinguish The World's Cultures? The Machine Learning-Based Cultural Values Inventory, Abhishek Sheetal, Shilpa Madan, Rui Ling Lee, Krishna Savani

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Scientists studying culture typically focus on a small number of theoretical constructs, such as individualism–collectivism, when seeking to explain cultural differences in psychological tendencies and behaviors. However, existing theories of culture could have missed out on important constructs that are useful for explaining cross-cultural differences. We used an abductive approach combining prediction and explanation to uncover important cultural values. In the prediction phase, based on 594 attitudes, values, and beliefs included in the World Values Survey, a neural network could classify respondents’ nationalities with 90% accuracy in out-of-sample data. In the explanation phase, a feature importance analysis identified the values …