Lori Rosenkopf

Lori Rosenkopf, Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value through Innovation (University of Pennsylvania: Wharton School Press, 2025)

Description: Discover your own path to entrepreneurship and make your mark in the world In a world where entrepreneurship often seems to be driven by tech prodigies and venture-backed unicorns, many aspiring entrepreneurs find themselves wondering: “What if I don’t fit the stereotype of a Silicon Valley wunderkind? Is there a place for me in this landscape?” In Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at The Wharton School, shatters these limiting perceptions, revealing a diverse array of entrepreneurial paths that are open to anyone with the drive to create value through innovation. Drawing from her thirty-year career and interactions with more than 20,000 students, Rosenkopf offers a compelling roadmap for entrepreneurial success. From Amy Errett’s disruption of the hair care industry with Madison Reed to Jarrid Tingle’s mission to diversify venture funding through Harlem Capital, the book showcases a rich tapestry of founders who have carved their own unique paths. These inspiring stories reveal that entrepreneurship is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, but a realm of possibilities limited only by one’s imagination and determination. In Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, discover: + 7 distinct entrepreneurial paths, from disruptors to intrapreneurs; + The 6 Rs of entrepreneurial success; + Insights for navigating the inevitable setbacks and challenges; + Strategies for overcoming biases and obstacles in securing funding and support; and + Tools for developing an entrepreneurial mindset, regardless of background or industry. Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur with a groundbreaking idea, a seasoned business owner looking to scale, or an employee seeking to drive innovation within your organization, this essential read will challenge your assumptions, unleash your entrepreneurial potential, and inspire you to make your mark in the world.

Thomas Klueter, Anindya Ghosh, Lori Rosenkopf (2024), Not in-sourced here! When does external technology sourcing yield familiar versus novel solutions?, Strategic Management Journal.

Abstract: Research Summary When established firms source technology from specialized technology firms, extant research has typically assumed that this in-sourced technology is novel. We test this assumption by modeling in-sourcing decisions using a problem-solution lens wherein firms choose from available external technological solutions to solve their market problems. Since the locus of identification, evaluation, and selection of external solutions remains internal to the firm's R&D personnel, we argue that they frequently prefer familiar over novel solutions. We identify two factors that help firms overcome this preference for familiarity: when top managers focus their attention on the market problem or when they receive feedback from unexpected failures to solve that problem. Our case control analysis of 715 in-sourced emerging technological solutions in the biopharmaceutical industry offers broad support to our theoretical framework. Managerial Summary Established firms are commonly advised to source novel technologies externally. Yet since this sourcing process is driven by in-house R&D personnel, we suggest that a firm's choice of external technology solutions may still tend toward familiar ones. We confirm this preference by examining in-sourcing events of emerging technological solutions by established firms in the biopharmaceutical industry. Despite this preference, we then show that increased top management attention toward a market problem and experiencing unexpected failures in bringing products to market catalyze a receptiveness to novel technological solutions. Our findings help managers in established firms recognize that their claims or intentions to seek novel technology are not always consistent with actual in-sourcing choices, and suggest when firms can overcome this tendency.

Valentina Assenova, Emilie Feldman, Lori Rosenkopf (Working), Conflicts of interest reduce the diffusion of microfinance.

Abstract: Existing studies on innovation diffusion in networks have established that the high network connectivity of “central” actors increases diffusion. However, this research has not accounted for the possibility that the multiple connections of central actors could generate conflicts of interest that impede diffusion. Using data from a prominent field experiment that revealed the usual association between the centrality of “community leaders” tasked with promoting microfinance and its subsequent diffusion, we document a negative relationship between leaders’ lending relationships and microfinance diffusion. That is, leaders who lend are less inclined to promote microfinance because doing so could compromise the returns from their lending relationships. Our analyses show that leaders with conflicts of interest are less effective conduits for innovation diffusion than their centrality might predict.

Ram Ranganathan, Anindya Ghosh, Lori Rosenkopf (2018), Competition-cooperation interplay during multi-firm technology coordination: The effect of firm heterogeneity on conflict and consensus in a technology standards organization, Strategic Management Journal, 39:3193-3221.

A. Ghosh, R. Ranganathan, Lori Rosenkopf (2016), The impact of context and model choice on the determinants of strategic alliance formation: Evidence from a staged replication study, Strategic Management Journal, 37:2204-2221.

A. Ghosh and Lori Rosenkopf (2015), Shrouded in structure: Challenges and opportunities for a friction-based view of network research, Organization Science, 26:622-631.

R. Ranganathan and Lori Rosenkopf (2014), Do ties really bind? The effect of knowledge and commercialization networks on opposition to standards, Academy of Management Journal, 57:515-540.

G. Dokko, A. Nigam, Lori Rosenkopf (2012), Keeping steady as she goes: A negotiated order perspective on technological evolution, Organization Studies, 33:681-703.

Abstract: A central idea in the theory of technology cycles is that social and political mechanisms are most important during the selection of a dominant design, and that eras of incremental change are socially uninteresting periods in which innovation is driven by technological momentum and elaboration of the dominant design. In this essay, we overturn the ontological assumption that social order is inherently stable, drawing on Anselm Strauss’s concept of negotiated order to analyze the persistence of a dominant design as a social accomplishment: an outcome of ongoing processes that reinforce or challenge a socially negotiated order. Thus, we shift focus from battles over standards to periods of normal innovation. We extend the technology cycles model to explain social dynamics in periods of incremental change, and to make predictions specifying how contextual conditions in standards-setting organizations affect social interaction, leading to reinforcement or challenge to a socio-technical order.

D. Lavie, J. Kang, Lori Rosenkopf (2011), Balancing exploration and exploitation within and across domains: Evaluation of performance implications in alliance portfolios, Organization Science, 22:1517-1538.

Abstract: Organizational research advocates that firms balance exploration and exploitation, yet it acknowledges inherent challenges in reconciling these opposing activities. To overcome these challenges, such research suggests that firms establish organizational separation between exploring and exploiting units or engage in temporal separation whereby they oscillate between exploration and exploitation over time. Nevertheless, these approaches entail resource allocation trade-offs and conflicting organizational routines, which may undermine organizational performance as firms seek to balance exploration and exploitation within a discrete field of organizational activity (i.e., domain). We posit that firms can overcome such impediments and enhance their performance if they explore in one domain while exploiting in another. Studying the alliance portfolios of software firms, we demonstrate that firms do not typically benefit from balancing exploration and exploitation within the function domain (technology versus marketing and production alliances) and structure domain (new versus prior partners). Nevertheless, firms that balance exploration and exploitation across these domains by engaging in research and development alliances while collaborating with their prior partners, or alternatively, by forming marketing and production alliances while seeking new partners, gain in profits and market value. Moreover, we reveal that increases in firm size that exacerbate resource allocation trade-offs and routine rigidity reinforce the benefits of balance across domains and the costs of balance within domains. Our domain separation approach offers new insights into how firms can benefit from balancing exploration and exploitation. What matters is not simply whether firms balance exploration and exploitation in their alliance formation decisions but the means by which they achieve such balance.

Lori Rosenkopf and Patia McGrath (2011), Advancing the Conceptualization and Operationalization of Novelty in Organizational Research, Organization Science, 22:1297-1311.

Abstract: The construct of novelty is an important primitive for theories of organization learning, strategic change, and innovation. The organizational pursuit of novelty is generally theorized as necessary for long-term organizational adaptation and survival yet variance increasing in the short term. We argue that the recent explosion of studies of exploration and exploitation tend to conceptualize and operationalize novelty quite narrowly. In contrast, we treat novelty as a multidimensional construct and discuss implications of this approach for future research.