Summary
Jiho Yang is a PhD candidate at the Management & Entrepreneurship Department, Imperial College London, expecting to graduate in July 2024, and is currently on the academic job market. Jiho is an innovation researcher with a focus on understanding how organizational structure impacts innovation and creativity. His dissertation explores two main areas: (1) identifying key contingencies under which organizational structure results in different innovative outcomes, and (2) discovering novel mechanisms connecting the structural characteristics of a firm with the behaviors and performance of creative employees. Empirically, he leverages a unique dataset encompassing comprehensive information on a firm’s inventive outcomes and employ econometric methods and natural language processing (NLP) techniques.
His job market paper explores how organizational structure influences development outcomes. Whereas previous studies, primarily focused on the research side, concluded that the centralization of research results in the generation of broader and original knowledge, the study found that centralizing development reduces duplication in development efforts but hampers the commercialization of development outcomes. This study underscores the importance of considering the distinctive nature of development activities as a crucial contingency that impacts the relationship between organizational structure and innovative outcomes.
In another paper, Jiho investigates how autonomy for R&D employees in selecting problems to work on influences creativity. By employing NLP techniques on a unique dataset of invention disclosure texts to measure how inventors formulate problems, the study discovered that autonomy negatively influences employee creativity through its effect on problem formulation. This paper contributes to the literature on organizational factors influencing creativity by suggesting a novel mechanism through which autonomy may hinder creativity.
Jiho holds an MRes in Business (with Distinction) from Imperial College, an MS in Business Administration (Summa Cum Laude) from Yonsei University, and a BBA from Yonsei University.