A common misconception about innovation, especially in Western cultures that celebrate individualism, is that an exemplary organization or visionary individual is the singular force that drives success. However, despite many valiant efforts, most new products fail.
Economic history is littered with examples of technologically superior alternatives confined to product-development purgatory that failed spectacularly upon reaching the market, or remained in obscurity for decades before eventual adoption. The broad reason innovation success is elusive is an incomplete understanding of the social and cultural factors that limit product success. Thus, the importance of social context for innovation success is a common thread running through my research.
My research examines the social antecedents and impacts of technological advances such as artificial intelligence. Current research projects include, first, a book on how AI use mediates the relationship between organizational arrangements and outcomes such as efficiency and effectiveness. I evaluate the conceptual model using survey data I collected recently from a sample of 1,000 employees in the United States. Second, I am working on several papers for which I am developing a “community-centered” design approach for improving social impacts. By community-centered design, I mean a method for designing products that incorporates the needs of diverse product users (rather than a typical user or persona) and situates the locus of control in product design within the purview of potential product users. Third, I am in the early stages of creating a GPT to help non-technical users improve the social impacts of products they are designing. The app will draw from my research on social impacts to inform its content and help users measure and evaluate the social impacts of their products. Lastly, I am collecting survey data that takes a closer look at respondents’ whose jobs were displaced by AI.