MIT Sloan Asst. Prof. Eric So
In the wake of the economic crisis, many companies these days seem to be undervalued. The current earnings-to-price ratios are high and often market commentators argue that these ratios reflect good opportunities to invest. However, the emergence of undervalued stocks comes at a time of high market uncertainty so it’s more important than ever for investors to identify strong investment opportunities based on a company’s fundamentals. Read More
MIT Sloan Asst. Prof. Haoxiang Zhu
When big investors want to execute trades but fear the size of the transaction could move the market, they often go to dark pools—alternative trading systems where orders are not publicly displayed. These opaque trading venues, now accounting for about 12 percent of equity trading volume in the United States, have sparked concern among regulators and in the financial press. With so many transactions occurring out of public view, critics warn that price discovery, the accurate determination of asset prices, will become more difficult. Read More
MIT Sloan Researcher Jose-Maria Fernandez
There is a growing consensus that the “bench-to-bedside” process of translating biomedical research into effective therapeutics is broken. A confluence of factors explains such pessimism but among the most widespread is the sense that the current the drug development business model is flawed. The development of new therapeutics is an expensive, lengthy, and risky process that challenges traditional funding vehicles, which are limited in size, Read More
MIT Sloan Sr. Lecturer Trond Undheim
Cleantech has seen its share of high profile failures over the past year. The bankruptcy of solar cell company Solyndra has been the most public, but there are many others. This has led many to say that the sector is immature, others to say it is doomed or plagued by fickle or unstable state subsidies. It is also true that quite often, Cleantech firms bank on (somebody) introducing changes in infrastructure that need significant momentum (and time) to take hold. But surely Cleantech CEOs are smart people, so the reason they fail must be slightly more complex, perhaps? And is it even so certain that the problem lies with the industry itself and not with other factors? Is failure, in fact, quite evenly distributed across sectors?
You may have noticed that strategies sometimes fail. Some would say strategies mostly fail. I know from my own life that intent does not always translate to result. The question is why.Jim Collins, in his book Why The Mighty Fail (2009), believes failures have a 5 stage lifecycle: hubris of success, pursuit of more, denial of risk, grasping at straws, and capitulation. Does his framework apply equally well across all industries? Is it fully relevant to cleantech?
MIT Sloan Assoc. Prof. Pierre Azoulay
What type of corporate culture is best for innovation? How ought firms and managers encourage their workers to be more creative? And if those workers fail in the pursuit of creativity, is that necessarily a bad thing?
These are the questions we wanted to answer in our latest paper.* We used life sciences as the backdrop of our research comparing similarly accomplished scientists who received either financial support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the large non-profit biomedical research organization, or federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The HHMI money lasts five years and is often renewed (at least once); the program “urges its researchers to take risks … even if it means uncertainty or the chance of failure.” The NIH grants, on the other hand, last three to five years, have more specific aims, and their renewal is far from an assured thing.
MIT Sloan Assoc. Prof. Gustavo Manso
Among other things, we looked at how often these scientists published articles that were among the top 5 percent or top 1 percent of the most cited papers in their fields. We found that the HHMI-funded scientists produced twice as many papers in the top 5 percent in terms of citations, and three times as many in the top 1 percent, relative to a control group of similarly accomplished scientists funded by the NIH. But they also were more prone to underperform relative to their own previous citation accomplishments. The take-away lesson is clear: biologists whose funding encourages them to take risks and tolerates initial research failures produce breakthrough ideas at a much higher rate than peers whose funding is dependent upon meeting closely defined, short-term research targets. But there is a cost associated with these long-term incentives, since they also lead to more frequent “duds.”
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