Stephanie L. Woerner

Big data: extending the business strategy toolbox

The business world is rapidly digitizing as companies embrace sensors, mobile devices, radio frequency identi- fication, audio and video streams, software logs, and the Internet to predict needs, avert fraud and waste, understand relationships, and connect with stakeholders both internal and external to the firm. Digitization creates challenges because for most companies it is unevenly distributed throughout the organization: in a 2013 survey, only 39% of company-wide investment in digitization was identified as being in the IT budget (Weill and Woerner, 2013a). This uneven, discon-necked investment makes it difficult to consolidate and simplify the increasing amount of data that is one of the outcomes of digitization. This in turn makes it more difficult to derive insight – and then proceed based on that insight. Early big data research identified over a dozen characteristics of data (e.g., location, network associations, latency, structure, softness) that challenge extant data management practices (Santos and Singer, 2012).

Optimizing your digital business model

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

The power of reciprocal knowledge sharing relationships for startup success

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the innovative capabilities of biotech start-ups in relation to geographic proximity and knowledge sharing interaction in the R & D network of a major high-tech cluster. Design/methodology/approach – This study compares longitudinal informal communication networks of researchers at biotech start-ups with company patent applications in subsequent years. For a year, senior R & D staff members from over 70 biotech firms located in the Boston biotech cluster were polled and communication information about interaction with peers, universities and big pharmaceutical companies was collected, as well as their geolocation tags. Findings – Location influences the amount of communication between firms, but not their innovation success. Rather, what matters is communication intensity and recollection by others. In particular, there is evidence that rotating leadership – changing between a more active and passive communication style – is a predictor of innovative perfo...

Conversational Coherence in Instant Messaging and Getting Work Done

This paper explores the critical role conversational coherence plays in facilitating the ongoing, distributed work of one virtual team as they engage in instant messaging (IM) conversations to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate. In studying the IM conversations of team members over the course of a month, a number of challenges to coherence emerged as they communicated with each other and worked together. These challenges include two previously identified challenges - lack of simultaneous feedback, and disrupted turn adjacency - and two additional challenges: multi-tasking, and authority. We describe the teams responses to these challenges and conclude by discussing implications for research

Revisiting complexity in the digital age

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

Analyzing VC Influence on Startup Success: A People-Centric Network Theory Approach

We study the impact of venture capitalists on startup success using social network analysis. Using multiple sources, we compile a unique dataset of 3199 US-based technology startups and their board members, from which we generate and analyze the interlocking directorates network (formal network) and the Twitter activity network (informal network). We define three metrics of success: startup funding (collected from Crunchbase), annual sales (collected from OneSource), and return-on-investment (annual sales/funding). We find that startups with more VCs on their board are more centrally located in the formal network, tend to receive greater funding, have greater annual sales, yet a smaller return-on-investment. We also find that VCs are significantly more central in the Twitter network than non-VCs, and they have greater Twitter popularity (number of followers/number of people they follow). Interestingly, VCs tweet significantly less than non-VCs. Our results indicate that VCs carry a significant amount of capital, both financially as well as socially, which they transmit to the startups they become involved with, yet they tend to invest disproportionately to startup revenue (hence lower ROI).

Resilience Through Collaborative Networks in Emerging Economies: Evidence from Chinese Venture Capital

The high-speed growth of emerging economies attracts the attention of global investors, but the uncertain institutional environment in emerging and transitional economies makes investors uneasy. Using China’s venture capital (VC) data, this article examines the performance consequences of differences in ownership between foreign and local investors, and network position established when VC firms (VCs) syndicate portfolio company investments. There is a phenomenon of separate institutional settings between China’s local VCs and foreign VCs in China, which makes ownership significantly affect investment performance. The VCs’ positions in the collaborative networks can play a mediating role; foreign VCs have better investment performance because of their more central-network position. Better-networked VCs can supplement or replace formal institutions in transitional economies.

Size does not matter - in the virtual world. Comparing online social networking behaviour with business success of entrepreneurs

We explore what benefits network position in online business social networks like LinkedIn might confer to an aspiring entrepreneur. We compare two network attributes, size and embeddedness, and two actor attributes, location and diversity, between virtual and real-world networks. The promise of social networks like LinkedIn is that network friends enable easier access to critical resources such as legal and financial services, customers, and business partners. Our setting consists of one million public member profiles of the German business networking site XING (a German version of LinkedIn) from which we extracted the network structure of 15,000 start-up entrepreneurs from 12 large German universities. We find no positive effect of virtual network size and embeddedness, and small positive effects of location and diversity.