Dr. Jingshu Du is an Associate Professor of Innovation and Strategy at EMLV - Ecole de Management Léonard de Vinci (Paris France), where she co-leads the interdisciplinary research group “New materials, intelligent systems and innovative companies”of both the engineering school and the management school. She is also an affiliated senior researcher at Paris Saclay University. Before coming to France, Jingshu Du worked in several top business schools across the continents. She was Assistant Professor of Strategic management and Innovation at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands); Senior Associate at Vlerick Business School, KU Leuven (Belgium); and the FWO granted long-stay research scholar at University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley in the United States).
Jingshu's research focuses on innovation strategy, in particular open and collaborative innovation, technology management, entrepreneurship, and strategic decision-making. Jingshu’s research output was published on several leading international academic journals and has received several prestigious awards in her academic and professional career.
Can you tell us about three significant articles in your career?
Sure. The first article that I would like to introduce is a paper from my doctoral dissertation, entitled "Managing open innovation projects with science-based and market-based partners" published on Research Policy. 3 years after it's published, it became a "highly-cited paper" on Web of Science (WoS), among the top 1% of all papers in social science. What is unique about this study is instead of taking a usual, corporate level view, I study how - at the project level - to organize collaboration with different partners (science-based and market-based partners). It is also one of the first papers that is based on hard empirical evidence to show the effect of open innovation - which has become an inevitable trend now.
The second paper that I'd like to talk about, is my sole-authored paper entitled "The up- and downside of collaboration in core and non-core technologies – Selective, contingent, and orchestrated openness in R&D collaborations" on Industrial Marketing Management. I'm very proud of this paper because, it is a paper that I independently wrote and independently went through the entire review process all by myself. It is not that easy (or perhaps even practical) to have a sole-authored publication nowadays, especially considering the fast pace and pressure of publication, and many times it has become a "paper factory" with each author doing standard practices along different parts of the production line. I took the challenge to write it all myself, and I'm happy about the result. When I wrote and revised the paper, it happened to be during the Covid pandemic. I was alone in The Netherlands, hearing the loud and sharp sirens of ambulance passing by every day and night. Glad that I survived the challenges, and more heart-warming is I have this paper.
The third paper that I'd like to introduce, which is under review and not published yet, is "Temporal Dynamics in Multipartner Coordination: Sequentiality and Simultaneity in R&D Projects". This paper is the "Best paper" finalist at the strategy division of the 80th Academy of Management, in which we study the temporal dynamics of collaboration with multiple types of partners in R&D projects. Here, building on my previous publication on Research Policy, we further dive into and explore the detailed mechanisms of collaboration. Extending from this line of research, and drawing from my own observations, I become especially interested in understanding the micro foundations of collaboration, for example, heuristics, biases, discourse, framing, and how do these "human factors" contribute to the making, breaking, the false positives and false negatives of innovation development.