In my work, I explore the conditions that support the creation of knowledge, its diffusion within communities, and sharing among competing businesses. In particular, my research revolves around three related research streams:

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  My first line of research examines how firms can share valuable private knowledge with their competitors absent effective appropriation mechanisms. In particular, I focus my attention on the role of institutional mechanisms, such as norms, monitoring, and sanctioning.

• My second line of research examines how communities and the norms they develop contribute to the creation and diffusion of knowledge. I pursue this interest by studying how academic communities evolve over time, and the role of individual researchers and their invisible colleges in shaping their evolution.
• In a third and more recent line of research, I examine the creation of knowledge, and the role of knowledge articulation, codification, and sharing in triggering progress along the learning curve. I conduct research at the organizational level to observe the effects of articulating, codifying, and sharing knowledge, and at the individual level to examine the mechanisms behind such effects.

A noteworthy quality of my work is its mixed-method approach. I enjoy combining the insights from multiple methods and truly believe that diverging empirical approaches can be complementary. For example, extensive fieldwork enables me to understand different research settings, form more precise hypotheses from theory, draw clear inferences from the data, and address issues that are of practical relevance to managers. In most papers, I use a combination of different methods – field experiments and qualitative data, laboratory experiments and field experiments, archival data and qualitative data.