Amy Zhao-Ding

Biography

Year of entry: 2014

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Overview:

Amy's dissertation examines different aspects of organizational learning in the opportunity discovery process. The starting point of the research is, although the first challenges entrepreneurs face are what opportunities to pursue and the iterative process to articulate the opportunities, these issues have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Using rich data in the empirical setting of mobile application developers, Amy applies the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to construct an opportunity landscape, which reflect different functionalities realized for a general purposed technology. She studies how entrepreneurial firms interpret information and navigate where to search in this opportunity landscape, and how they leverage product and market experiences to develop cognitive structures and further guide their competitive positioning and resource allocation.

Amy is broadly interested in how managers interpret information and respond to performance, technological and user preference changes in their demand environment. She also explores these topics in the mutual fund industry and the instant photography industry.