Ndu (Richard) Ugwuanyi

Doctoral Student

Contact Information

Primary Email:
ndubuisi@wharton.upenn.edu
Office Phone:
215-573-8823

office Address:
2055 SH-DH
3620 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: Entrepreneurial financing and strategy, Technology & Emerging Markets Strategy

Overview

Richard’s immediate interests are in entrepreneurship, technology strategy and emerging markets. His current work examines how resources shape entrepreneurial experimentation, a cornerstone of innovation-or technology-driven startups. His work relies on large archival datasets, applied econometrics and deep learning – especially large language models – to generate theoretical and practical insights about startups.

Previously, he worked in quality control and continuous improvement in the cosmetics development and manufacturing industry, and as a technical research scientist at the National Research Council of Canada. Growing up, he had experience running a small family business and later had experience working on startups.

Richard obtained a BSc with first class honors in Pure and Industrial Chemistry, specializing in industrial chemical technology. He has an MASc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Toronto and an MS in Management from the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Canada.

He has served as the departmental doctoral seminar chair at Wharton.

Research

Goce Andrevski, Danny Miller, Ndubuisi Ugwuanyi (2022), Situational Experience, Expertise, and the Janus-face of Forbearance, Academy of Management Proceedings, Vol.2022, No. 1 ().
Abstract: We study the drivers and performance outcomes of strategic forbearance – a purposeful decision not to respond to a rival’s competitive attack. Leveraging theories of skill development, we argue that forbearance can be strategically beneficial or not depending on competitors’ situational experience and level of expertise. We find that competitors with extensive experience in dealing with specific competitive situations are more likely to choose forbearance over response; however they benefit from forbearance only when they are skillful enough to create long-term positional advantage; otherwise, forbearance leads to inferior performance. Additionally, expert competitors with the highest skills favor response over forbearance, but benefit from both forbearance and response, whereas forbearance by those of limited expertise hurts performance. We operationalize forbearance as gambit decline in chess and test our propositions on a sample of 3,515 chess players making 236,767 decisions to accept or decline a gambit offer.

Teaching

COMM 401 – Business and Corporate Strategy, Smith School of Business, Queen’s University

MGMT 7010 (MBA) – Strategy & Competitive Advantage, Wharton

MGMT 8900 (Executive MBAs) – Strategic Management, Wharton

MGMT 2230 – Business Strategy, Wharton

MGMT 8950 (Executive MBAs) – Doing Business in Argentina, Wharton

MGMT 8010 (MBAs) – Entrepreneurship, Wharton

All Courses

MGMT1010 - Intro To Management
We all spend much of our lives in organizations. Most of us are born in organizations, educated in organizations, and work in organizations. Organizations emerge because individuals can't (or don't want to) accomplish their goals alone. Management is the art and science of helping individuals achieve their goals together. Managers in an organization determine where their organization is going and how it gets there. More formally, managers formulate strategies and implement those strategies. This course provides a framework for understanding the opportunities and challenges involved in formulating and implementing strategies by taking a "system" view of organizations,which means that we examine multiple aspects of how managers address their environments, strategy, structure, culture, tasks, people, and outputs, and how managerial decisions made in these various domains interrelate. The course will help you to understand and analyze how managers can formulate and implement strategies effectively. It will be particularly valuable if you are interested in management consulting, investment analysis, or entrepreneurship - but it will help you to better understand and be a more effective contributor to any organizations you join, whether they are large, established firms or startups. This course must be taken for a grade.

Activity

Latest Research

Goce Andrevski, Danny Miller, Ndubuisi Ugwuanyi (2022), Situational Experience, Expertise, and the Janus-face of Forbearance, Academy of Management Proceedings, Vol.2022, No. 1 ().

All Research