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Research Interests: I research organization theory and strategy, specifically organizational knowledge, innovation, and categorization. My dissertation investigates the conditions under which novel technological innovation leads to the emergence of new organizational categories. New innovations often spur the formation of a new market or organizational category, but this is not always the case. I suggest that the existing category structure affects this process, because classification systems constrain organizations to varying degrees. I propose that novel innovation is more likely to result in a new organizational category when the boundaries of existing categories are sharply defined, but that this will not happen as frequently in environments where organizations are classified by loosely defined labels. I'm studying these ideas in the context of the software industry, where there is both technological invention, and many categories that emerge over time. I use patent data to identify novel innovation, and press releases, where software organizations self-identify with categories, for categorization data. I created a data set of these categories using text-matching programs to extract categories using all 200,000 software related press releases issued between 1990 - 2002. Publications:
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