Giada Di Stefano also Awarded by the Academy of Management
The Best Dissertation Award – Technology and Innovation Management Division, given to Giada Di Stefano, is the icing on the cake of a memorable Bocconi PhD School expedition to San Antonio, Texas, for the Academy of Management Annual Meeting (August 12-16, 2011).
Di Stefano, who last June also received from the Province of Milano the Premio Isimbardi 2011 assigned to young talents, was both in the final five for the Technology and Innovation Division award and in the final seven for the Business Policy and Strategy Division award (the other two Academy of Management divisions being Organization Behaviour and Organization Theory). A graduate of Bocconi PhD School, Di Stefano is going to start her academic career as an assistant professor at HEC Paris.
Elena Novelli, another Bocconi Phd School recent graduate now working for Bath University, was a finalist for the Business Policy and Strategy Division while Carmelo Cennamo, assistant professor at Bocconi and graduate from IE PhD School was another finalist for the Technology and Innovation Management Division.
Here follows an abstract of her dissertation, Knowledge, Innovation, and Social Norms in Creative Industries: Three Essays.
Abstract. Can decentralized institutions protect innovation-related knowledge when property rights are lacking? Recently scholars have proposed that social norms can substitute for legal protection and facilitate knowledge transfer.
In my dissertation, I use a scenario-based field experiment to test these claims and explore the conditions under which norms are effective. First, I evaluate the relative predictive power of two alternative explanations - social norms and intellectual property strategies - and the conditions under which they act as complements or substitutes. Second, I assess the effect of geographical clusters on norms and information transfer. Third, I focus on the role of enforcement for holding social norms in place, by investigating when and why individuals are more likely to sanction norm violations.
My findings show that norms may play a role in governing the use of transferred information, by either substituting for or complementing strategic mechanisms. I find support for the idea that the protection provided by social norms enhances the exchange of information among clustered competitors. Finally, I show that a party's propensity to sanction an offense is driven by the severity and visibility of the violation, the reputation of the violator, and the existence of an exchange relationship with the violator.
I believe my research has the potential to make a valuable contribution. A better understanding of how information flows when it cannot be legally protected is critical to both theory and practice. Convincing evidence that norms protect innovation from misappropriation could help explain why some industries such as fashion, gourmet cuisine, and music maintain high levels of innovation despite operating in weak appropriability regimes. Most of all, I provide a more complete validation and an extension of the role played by social norms in protecting intellectual property. Firms are more willing to trade know-how if they expect their counterparts to use it properly.