Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management
MIT Sloan's Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management (TIES) Group represents a group of scholars and practitioners with a shared interest in understanding the challenges of innovation—moving ideas from the earliest stages of basic research to effective products and services with an impact on the world.
Within this broad set of interests our community explores:
- the factors that enable effective production of basic research
- the role of entrepreneurship and strategy in bringing ideas into the market
- nd the strategic challenges faced by large organizations as they strive to remain at the innovation frontier.
Work in the group also explores the conditions that ensure that innovation and entrepreneurship is effective in driving economic and social impact at the local, regional, and national level; including the design of programs such as innovation contests, startup accelerators, etc., in developed as well as developing nations.
Our group embraces scholarship on these topics from multiple disciplinary perspectives (including economics, sociology, and engineering) and using a diverse set of research methodologies (including historical case studies, large-sample econometric analyses, and ethnography).
Examples of recent topics tackled by TIES faculty include:
- the adoption of digital currencies and block chain
- the measurement of growth-oriented entrepreneurship
- the effects of public R&D funding on the productivity of private-sector firms
- the governance and design of multi-sided platforms
- social status as a source of competitive advantage
- the foundations of entrepreneurial strategy.
The industries being studied are similarly diverse, such as the biopharmaceutical sector, clean energy startups, or traditional capital-intensive industries undergoing the effects of digitization.
In addition to creating new sources of data and doing research, our faculty teach and mentor students throughout MIT. Within MIT Sloan, our group has primary responsibility for the curriculum of the MBA program’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Track, the core competitive strategy courses in the MBA and Executive MBA programs, as well as the “Innovation-driven Advantage” course in the Sloan Fellows program. Beyond MIT Sloan, we are heavily involved in the undergraduate minor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, including the Venture Engineering class offered in conjunction with colleagues from the MIT School of Engineering. Members in the group also take a leading role in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, the Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, the MIT Innovation Initiative, and many other groups and programs across the MIT campus with an entrepreneurship or innovation focus.
PhD students in the TIES group
PhD Students in the TIES Group
Rigorous, discipline-based research is the hallmark of the MIT Sloan PhD Program. Ph.D. students in the TIES group are scholars who will soon lead in their fields of research—those with outstanding intellectual skills who will carry forward productive research on the complex technological issues that characterize an increasingly competitive and challenging business world.