Ethan R. Mollick

Establishing Moore's Law

The seemingly unshakeable accuracy of Moores law - which states that the speed of computers; as measured by the number of transistors that can be placed on a single chip, will double every year or two - has been credited with being the engine of the electronics revolution, and is regarded as the premier example of a self-fulfilling prophecy and technological trajectory in both the academic and popular press. Although many factors have kept Moores law as an industry benchmark, it is the entry of foreign competition that seems to have played a critical role in maintaining the pace of Moores law in the early VLSI transition. Many different kinds of chips used many competing logic families. DRAMs and microprocessors became critical to the semiconductor industry, yet were unknown during the original formulation of Moores law

Mandatory Fun: Consent, Gamification and the Impact of Games at Work

In an effort to create a positive experience at work, managers have deployed a wide range of initiatives and practices designed to improve the affective experience for workers. One such practice is gamification, introducing elements from games into the work environment with the purpose of improving employees’ affective experiences. Games have long been played at work, but they have emerged spontaneously from the employees themselves. Here, we examine whether managerially-imposed games provide the desired benefits for affect and performance predicted by prior studies on games at work or whether they are a form of “mandatory fun.” We highlight the role of consent (Burawoy, 1979) as a psychological response to mandatory fun, which moderates these relationships and, in a field experiment, find that games, when consented to, increase positive affect at work, but, when consent is lacking, decrease positive affect. In a follow up laboratory experiment, we also find that legitimation and a sense of individual agency are important sources of consent.

Democratizing innovation and capital access: : The role of crowdfunding

This article focuses on how crowdfunding might democratize the commercialization of innovation as well as financing. First, it examines how crowdfunders decide what effort to support and asks how do crowd and expert decisions differ? Second, it investigates whether crowdfunding democratizes access to capital by asking whether groups that have historically been underrepresented in capital markets gain additional access to capital markets through crowdfunding. Finally, it investigates whether crowdfunding leads to the growth of new firms in the same way that traditional funding does. Taken together, these questions point at a potentially vast alternative infrastructure for developing, funding, and commercializing innovation.

Shifts and Ladders: Comparing the Role of Internal and External Mobility in Managerial Careers

Employees can build their careers either by moving into a new job within their current organization or else by moving to a different organization. We use matching perspectives on job mobility to develop predictions about the different roles that those internal and external moves will play within careers. Using data on the careers of master of business administration alumni, we show how internal and external mobility are associated with very different rewards: upward progression into a job with greater responsibilities is much more likely to happen through internal mobility than external mobility; yet despite this difference, external moves offer similar increases in pay to internal, as employers seek to attract external hires. Consistent with our arguments, we also show that the pay increases associated with external moves are lower when the moves take place for reasons other than career advancement, such as following a layoff or when moving into a different kind of work. Despite growing interest in boundaryless careers, our findings indicate that internal and external mobility play very different roles in executives’ careers, with upward mobility still happening overwhelmingly within organizations.

Activist Choice Homophily and the Crowdfunding of Female Founders

In this paper, we examine when members of underrepresented groups choose to support each other, using the context of the funding of female founders via donation-based crowdfunding. Building on theories of choice homophily, we develop the concept of activist choice homophily, in which the basis of attraction between two individuals is not merely similarity between them, but rather perceptions of shared structural barriers stemming from a common social identity based on group membership. We differentiate activist choice homophily from homophily based on the similarity between individuals (“interpersonal choice homophily”), as well as from “induced homophily,” which reflects the likelihood that those in a particular social category will affiliate and form networks. Using lab experiments and field data, we show that activist choice homophily provides an explanation for why women are more likely to succeed at crowdfunding than men and why women are most successful in industries in which they are least represented.

Filthy Lucre? Innovative Communities, Identity, and Commercialization

Online communities play an increasingly important role in developing innovation. However, relatively little is known about the ways in which community affiliation influences how innovations and products generated in these communities are commercialized. By examining open source software (OSS) as an example of an innovation community and using both a quasi experiment and a longitudinal survey, I seek to shed light on this issue. In the quasi experiment, using the launch of the Apple App Store, I find a decreased propensity toward commercialization among individuals associated with online community innovation. I then examine the mechanisms for this decreased commercialization with a novel longitudinal survey of OSS community members. Despite the history of OSS as an anticommercial community, I do not find that anticommercial attitudes play a role in commercialization decisions. Instead, differences in entrepreneurial self-identity have large significant effects on the propensity to commercialize. I conclude...

When Firms are Potemkin Villages: Formal Organizations and the Benefits of Crowdfunding

Scholars have long been interested in the reasons why firms exist, arguing that they have efficiency and productivity benefits over other approaches to organizing. We examine why entrepreneurs often form firms, since entrepreneurial ventures are not large enough to accrue many of the expected efficiency benefits from formality. Instead, we argue that there are reasons besides efficiency (and regulation) that cause firms to exist. We suggest that an unrecognized implication of new institutional and ecological theory leads entrepreneurs to establish firms as a legitimating agent, and to allow them to act in industries with existing firm populations. We test this theory by examining a unique sample of crowd-funded startup companies, to empirically identify the advantages of formal versus informal organizations with different types of third party entities. We find that adopting the mantle of a formal organization helps entrepreneurs in contexts where they operate with other formal organizations, but not in interactions with other types of resource holders. We also demonstrate that crowdfunding may have substantial benefits for entrepreneurs beyond fundraising.

Crowdfunding as a Font of Entrepreneurship: Outcomes of Reward-Based Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has attracted considerable interest as a new way of financing a variety of ventures, from creative works to for-profit companies. For example, as of 2017, Kickstarter, the largest reward-based crowdfunding site, has facilitated the raising of over USD 2.9 billion from over 12 million people, funding over 100,000 projects. In this chapter, I will use data from two large-scale surveys of Kickstarter funders to shed light on the impacts of reward-based funding. I will first examine whether crowdfunded projects actually provide their promised rewards. Then I will delve into the wider impact of reward crowdfunding projects.

Experience through Enterprise: Entrepreneurial Careers, Fates, and Fortunes

The symposium as organized provides a platform to discuss the career of the ex-entrepreneur. Four papers are assembled, addressing post-entrepreneurial career outcomes (such as entrepreneurial pers...

Second Thoughts About Second Acts: Gender Differences in Serial Founding Rates

Men are far more likely to start new ventures than women. We argue that one explanation of this gap is that women respond differently to signals of past entrepreneurial success due to the “male hubris, female humility” effect. We argue that as a result women are disproportionately less likely to persist in second founding attempts than men when they have succeeded or failed by large margins. Using a data set of serial founders in crowdfunding, we find evidence supporting this prediction. We then turn to a unique survey of founders in crowdfunding in order to examine alternative explanations. We find support for a variety of systematic differences between male and female founders, but the persistence effect remains. While decreased persistence in the face of low quality opportunities benefits women individually, we argue that it disadvantages women as a group, as it leads to 25.3% fewer female-led foundings in our sample than would have occurred if women reacted similarly to men.