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W.M. Keck Professor and Professor of Management Science and Engineering

Riitta Katila

W.M. Keck Professor and Professor of Management Science and Engineering
Riitta Katila is the W. M. Keck Sr. Professor of Management Science, Faculty Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and HAI Sabbatical Scholar at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. Her research is in the intersection of technology strategy and organizational learning, using machine learning, statistical analysis and mixed methods. She is an expert on innovation, competition, and entrepreneurship in large firms, and her current research centers on digital platforms, regulation of technology ecosystems, decentralization of decision-making, and responsible and inclusive innovation. Katila's research pushes the theoretical boundaries of institutional logics, resource dependence and evolutionary search theories to understand how organizations innovate and change.

Prof. Katila's research has received several international honors. She is an Alfred P. Sloan Industry Studies Fellow and winner of the Schendel Prize by the Strategic Management Society. Katila is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Management and Fellow of the Strategic Management Society.

Katila received Academy of Management's Stephan M. Schrader Award for Outstanding Research in Technology and Innovation Management, and the Thought Leader Award in Entrepreneurship. Katila is the recipient of the Eugene L. Grant Faculty Teaching Award at Stanford, an alumni impact award from Aalto University's School of Science (former Helsinki University of Technology) and was selected to Tau Beta Pi Teaching Honor Roll at Stanford. She is Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Annals and of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and has served on the editorial review boards of Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Organization, and the Strategic Management Journal. She is currently on Strategic Management Society's Board of Directors, and is past-President of the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the Academy of Management.

Katila studied engineering economics and information systems as an undergraduate, earned a Ph.D. in technology strategy at UT Austin on a Fulbright Scholarship, and received a Doctorate in Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. In between, she worked at a management consultancy and in telecommunications. Trained as an industrial engineer, she is known as a trailblazer for women engineers and scientists.

Media Resources for Recent Research:

For the in-press Strategic Management Journal 2024 paper on AI and supervised machine learning for strategy scholars, see Sage Research Methods video https://methods.sagepub.com/video/machine-learning-and-publicprivate-fi… and AI for good https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09573. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS6qJG3vZPM

For access to publications, http://web.stanford.edu/~rkatila/lagunita/publications.html

Antitrust in big tech platforms Strategic Management Journal 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuDwEAmzApg

On big fish vs big pond tie choice Academy of Management Journal 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4V-P6GzWEE

Award-winning SMS video abstract on lean startup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ3uvFGf1o8

On expertise https://hbr.org/2017/12/too-many-experts-can-hurt-your-innovation-proje…
On innovation and experiments https://hbr.org/2021/04/to-make-lean-startups-work-you-need-a-balanced-…
On big tech antitrust https://hbr.org/2023/02/the-surprising-consequences-of-antitrust-action…

On how to best use your expertise: What’s the sweet spot for experts? Academy of Management Journal 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSKM9jjmS5k