Brown Bag: Prof. Stine Grodal
Prof. Stine Grodal (BU) will give a Brown Bag seminar on 8. May 2019.
The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation of Prof. Georg von Krogh invites you to a brownbag seminar with:
Professor Stine Grodal
Boston University
Date: Wednesday 8th May 2019: 12:00-12:30 lunch, 12:30-14:00 presentation
Location: Room F109, Weinbergstrasse 56, Zurich
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Gems, Skin or Chrome: Aesthetic Shifts in the U.S. Hearing Aid Industry (1945-2015)
Aesthetics play an important role in the success of technology products. Scholars have theorized about how the aesthetics of technology products evolve over the technology lifecycle. Yet, due to limited empirical evidence the literature remains inconclusive about how aesthetic shifts occur. We extend this literature through an inductive examination of technological and aesthetic innovations in the hearing aid industry over the 70-year period 1945-2015. We identify that aesthetic innovations tend to occur within the confinement of a dominant aesthetic—that is, a constellation of aesthetic elements present in most products within a given time period. We also find that categorical aspirations—the aim to have their products attain the meanings associated with an external category—are a core driver of aesthetic innovation. However, these new categorical aspirations remain latent and do not immediately spur aesthetic innovations that challenge the dominant aesthetic. A technological discontinuity typically unleashes these latent categorical aspirations, generating a period of aesthetic experimentation during the era of ferment. Over time and through a selection process the product category settles into a new dominant aesthetic manifestation, which undergoes minor aesthetic elaborations as the technology matures.
About the speaker
Stine Grodal is Associate Professor at Boston University Questrom School of Business in the department of Strategy and Innovation. She received her PhD from Stanford University. Her research focuses on the emergence and evolution of markets, industries and organizational fields with a focus on the role categories and technologies play in this process. In particular some of her work explores the strategic actions that market participants take to shape and exploit categorical structures. Her work has received numerous awards including the EGOS Best Paper Award and the TIM Best Paper Award. Her work has been published in both management and sociology journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review and Organization Science.
We look forward to welcoming you!
Kind regards,
The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation
Upcoming SMI Brownbag Seminars
22 May: Paul Carlile, Boston University
3 July: Gautam Ahuja, Cornell University
26 September: Michael Cusumano, MIT
20 November: Marvin Lieberman, UCLA
11 December: Brian Pentland, Michigan State University