Keyvan Vakili

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School; Academic Director, Data Science and AI Initiative

I am a strategy scholar interested in the antecedents of innovation and collaboration within creative settings. In particular, I explore how the technological and institutional contexts in which individuals and firms operate shapes their choice of collaboration and consequently the characteristics of their innovations in terms of novelty and impact. I explore these topics in three related research streams.

In my first research stream, I explore how the technological context, such as the pace of change, modularity, and breadth of applications, moderate the costs and benefits associated with knowledge diversity and distant recombinations. The findings contribute to our understanding of the relationship between knowledge diversity and the characteristics of innovation output in terms of novelty and impact. In the second research stream, I take a step back to study how the external environment influences the decision of individuals and firms to collaborate and the composition of their collaborative arrangements in the first place. I specifically focus on how the characteristics of the surrounding technological and institutional environments influence the collaboration choice of individuals and firms and, consequently, their innovation output. Finally, in my third research stream, I focus on how scientists and inventors choose the topics or areas in which they invest their efforts.

Before joining academia, I was an entrepreneur and worked as a consultant. In 2006, I founded a video game production company, which was acquired by Samsung Co, three years later. As a consultant, I worked with executives in a range of industries such as auto, oil, education, software and hardware.I currently advise several startups in the fields of mobile apps, cloud computing, and blockchain technology.