Innovation Forum 2025.10.15 Cornelia Storz
Date:October 15(Wednesday), 2025from 16:00 to 17:30 Topic:“Business Scholars on Boards and Firm Innovation” Speaker:Cornelia Storz(Professor, Goethe University, Frankfurt) Abstract:Why do business scholars-directors, rather than STEM scholar-directors, drive firm innovation? This paper addresses this unexpected pattern through an abductive research design combining panel data, interviews, and publication analysis. Drawing on a hand-collected dataset of Chinese listed firms (2008–2018), we show that business scholars on corporate boards enhance innovation by contributing strategic knowledge – higher-order, portable insights rooted in frameworks, heuristics, and theories that help firms navigate the uncertainty inherent in innovation across market dynamics, organizational design, and competitive positioning. We theorize strategic knowledge as a distinct asset, whose impact is contingent on insider technology directors’…