Brown Bag: Professor Reddi Kotha

The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation at ETH invites you to the brown bag seminar with:

Prof. Reddi Kotha
Singapore Management University
external page https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/reddi-kotha-1961

Date: Tuesday, September 19th, 12:00-14:00
Location: Online (zoom link will be shared a few days before the seminar via the Brown Bag mailing list)

Presentation title

How Does War Story Sharing by Successful Entrepreneurs Shape Entrepreneurship Training?

Abstract

Sharing lessons from experience (hereafter war stories) by successful entrepreneurs is a common practice in training programs for de novo entrepreneurs. Yet, war stories’ content and their effect on audiences is unknown. We examine this issue through a field-experiment in Singapore during 2019-2020, on 339 de novo entrepreneurs randomly assigned to two treatment arms: training by successful entrepreneurs sharing their war stories or training by experienced instructors imparting structured innovation strategy frameworks. We tracked venture performance until 2022. Abductive analysis of war-stories’ content revealed that successful entrepreneurs encouraged de novo entrepreneurs to focus on their ventures’ survival. Furthermore, ventures led by de novo entrepreneurs exposed to war-stories treatment experienced comparatively greater revenue growth, especially when successful and de novo entrepreneurs were similar in nationality.

About the speaker

Reddi Kotha is a Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at Singapore Management University (SMU). He was a visiting faculty at Georgetown University in the Fall of 2022. He is an Associate Editor at the Academy of Management Journal and served as guest editor of the market entry special issue at Journal of Management Studies.
An award-winning researcher and teacher, Dr. Kotha has published articles on the commercialization of science and the scaling of businesses in leading academic journals and practice outlets. He teaches across undergraduate, masters, doctorate degree programs and executive education custom programs in areas of innovation, entrepreneurship, and growth. He was awarded a Singapore Social Science Research Council grant of nearly SG $800,000 to work on training interventions to enable entrepreneurs to scale. Dr. Kotha served as the Academic Director (AD) of the Master of Science in Innovation (MI) program from 2018 to 2022. He served as the Academic Co-Advisor of SMU’s Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship. He was part of the steering committee for two successful Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan competitions, named after Singapore’s long-serving Prime Minister.

We look forward to welcoming you!

Kind regards,
The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation