Research
Evaluators need categories to compare things. Novelty rarely fits them.
I study how categorical order shapes evaluation and resource allocation under uncertainty. Markets and organizations run on shared classification systems: investors, employers, and audiences rely on categories to tell what something is before they can judge what it is worth. Innovation and entrepreneurship, meanwhile, create value precisely by departing from those categories. That tension raises the question that organizes my work — how do actors get rewarded for novelty when evaluation is built around categories?
Three linked questions follow. When does categorical complexity help actors rather than hurt them? Through what mechanisms do evaluators translate categorical information into judgments and rewards? And how can actors shape the categorization process itself, rather than simply being classified by others? I pursue them in three settings where the stakes are observable: financing markets, academic labor markets, and entrepreneurial evaluation.
Strategic categorization and evaluation
How market categories shape evaluation and strategic action where boundaries blur. The through-line is controllability: whether actors can influence how their category affiliations are constructed and communicated, or whether those affiliations are imposed on them by audiences.
Fintech CVC · blockchain venturesPublishing as spanning versus focus
How business schools convert publication records into rewards. Cross-field publishing can read as breadth and reach, or as poor fit and a diluted identity — and which reading prevails depends on field-specific evaluative templates rather than quality in the abstract.
Salary panels · six business fieldsEvaluation in entrepreneurship
Meta-analysis used to reconcile mixed findings and decompose widely used constructs into mechanisms and boundary conditions. The aim is to identify which founder and venture attributes are consistently rewarded under uncertainty — and which founders pay for not matching the prototype.
Meta-analytic synthesisAcross these contexts, the consequences of categorical complexity are contingent. They depend on what becomes salient to evaluators, on who gets to shape categorical claims, and on how evaluative templates are maintained and revised over time.
Publications
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2026
When Does Category Spanning Hurt or Help Producers? With Jean-Philippe Vergne and Amanda Sharkey · Strategic Management JournalUTD24 / FT50 A meta-analysis of 25 years of category spanning research, introducing controllability over category claims as a unifying explanation for why spanning is penalized in some settings and rewarded in others.
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2023
The Value of Publishing in JIBS With Chengguang Li, Juan Bu, and Klaus Meyer · Journal of International Business Studies, 54(9): 1688–1699UTD24 / FT50 Salary panel of 396 strategy professors at 59 U.S. public universities, showing that publications in a flagship outlet carry measurable compensation effects across adjacent disciplinary labor markets.
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2019
Sensemaking in and around Organizations With Lee Watkiss · Oxford Bibliographies in Management
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2016
The Role of Noise in a Mutual Selection and Learning Model With Yongha Kwon, Ji-hyun Kim, and Jae-suk Yang · Journal of East and West Studies, 28: 151–174
Working papers
Under revision
- Salary returns to publication portfolios across business fields. With Chengguang Li.
- Partner status and entrepreneurial outcomes: a meta-analysis. With Pankaj Patel, Richard Chan, James Dunne, and Manoj Mahajan.
Proposal accepted
- Automated categorization and producers' social evaluations. With Jean-Philippe Vergne. Research in the Sociology of Organizations.
In progress
- Category spanning and blockchain funding. With Jean-Philippe Vergne and Eric Zhao.
- Founding team career-path diversity and investment outcomes. With Hyeonsuh Lee and Seojin Kim.
- Managerial categorization and corporate venture capital investment.
- Optimal distinctiveness through rivalry and meaning repair. With Lee Watkiss.
- Category spanning in academic careers: mobility and networks.
- Gatekeeping by editorial leadership.
- Quality signals and new venture investment decisions: a meta-analysis. With Richard Chan, Pankaj Patel, and David Gomulya.
Teaching
I teach entrepreneurship as a way of making evidence-based decisions under uncertainty. Students tend to arrive with one of two assumptions: that entrepreneurship is mostly inspiration and hustle, or that it is a gamble that cannot really be taught. My courses are built to show it can be learned — by turning vague ideas into assumptions that can be tested, making tradeoffs under real limits of time, money, and information, and defending those choices to people who have to judge them on thin evidence.
Case writing is part of that. Cases force decisions with incomplete information, which is the actual condition of the work, and writing them sharpens the decision points I bring into class. I am currently building a technology entrepreneurship track, with modules and cases on blockchain and other settings where categories are unsettled and benchmarks keep moving.
Courses taught
- Stony Brook University · 2023–present BUS 353 Entrepreneurship Undergraduate elective on creating and growing new ventures: opportunity evaluation, business model design, team building, customer reach, and funding decisions. Instructor every semester since Fall 2023.
- Ivey Business School · Fall 2020 Power and Politics (MBA) Shadowing with Professor Mark Zbaracki.
- Yonsei University · 2015–2016 Strategic Management (PhD, MBA, BBA) Teaching assistant to Professor Ji-hyun Jason Kim.
How the course runs
- Frameworks Reusable tools for uncertain situations — defining a customer problem, designing a value proposition, comparing business models, assessing competition, choosing among funding options.
- Participation Designed to reward thinking rather than talking. Students prepare against specific prompts: name the biggest uncertainty, defend one strategic choice, propose a test.
- Doing and communicating Students develop a venture idea across the term, deliver an individual pitch, and close with a team presentation of a full business plan.