Much like in other decision-making contexts, entrepreneurs are guided—and constrained—by their pre-existing knowledge domains. These knowledge sets, stemming from individual experiences and backgrounds, shape what is considered salient when framing entrepreneurial problems and making strategic decisions.
In this study, we investigate whether raising entrepreneurs' awareness of how their knowledge domains influence idea creation and evaluation leads to changes in their idea generation and performance, and whether such changes are facilitated by an “enabling technology”, the Theory-based Experimentation (Camuffo et al., 2024).
This approach moderates the costs of searching across larger knowledge domains. Our prediction is tested through data from a field experiment involving 111 early-stage entrepreneurs and a simulation-based experiment with 133 entrepreneurship graduate students.
Myriam Mariani is full professor of applied economics. She earned a PhD from the Marche Polytechnic University and completed a two years post-doc Marie Curie fellowship at MERIT (Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology).
She is the Dean for Academic Strategy and Institutional Affairs of Bocconi. Her work focuses on inventors’ job motivations and knowledge transmission during the inventive process. Her most recent research studies the career effects of overwork and temporal flexibility for women. She also investigates why there are so few women in innovation, and the processes through which they select in and out from the inventive profession.
The seminar will be held in English.
Co-Authors of the work: Myriam Mariani (Bocconi), George Chondrakis (Esade), Claudia Frosi (Bocconi) e Luisa Gagliardi (Bocconi).
Major Information: Daniela Bolzani (daniela.bolzani@unibo.it).