Sheryl Winston Smith

Academy of Management Proceedings 2025(1) Doi: https://doi.org/10.5465/amproc.2025.16188symposium

In the rapidly evolving digital economy, trust serves as a critical foundation for the success and sustainability of digital platforms. As intermediaries facilitating interactions and transactions between diverse stakeholders, platforms rely heavily on trust to attract users, enable collaboration, and drive engagement. However, the rise of algorithmic decision-making, opaque governance structures, and concerns over data privacy have introduced new complexities into how trust is built, maintained, and eroded in these ecosystems. This symposium explores trust in digital platforms through the lens of strategy and technology and innovation management, bringing together scholars and practitioners to examine its implications for competitive advantage, user retention, and long-term viability. Anchored in strategic management and technology and innovation management, the discussion will address key questions, such as: How do platforms design trust-enabling mechanisms, such as reputation systems and transparent governance? What role does trust play in scaling platform ecosystems, particularly in fostering user adoption and partnerships? How do regulatory pressures and ethical considerations shape trust dynamics in platform governance? The session will feature empirical and conceptual insights, highlighting the interplay between strategic choices and trust outcomes in digital environments. It will also provide a forum for discussing challenges, such as trust deficits arising from misinformation, algorithmic bias, and data breaches, and propose forward-looking strategies to address these risks.

Academy of Management Proceedings 2025(1) Doi: https://doi.org/10.5465/amproc.2025.16598abstract

Early-stage investing relationships have been predicated on face-to-face interaction, in part to mitigate inherent information asymmetries. However, the global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden, large-scale move to digital operations, thus questioning previous assumptions about physical location. We exploit the unprecedented move to digital delivery of accelerator cohorts, where investors are exposed to large numbers of startups for potential deals. We leverage a novel, deal-level dataset of 63,660 deals spanning 5,691 financing rounds, 1,630 startups and 8326 investors. The data comprises 30 accelerator programs focused on ‘green shift’ innovation and sustainability from 2018-2023. Results point to the digital shift paradoxically broadening the investor and startup base while also increasing agency concerns. We find evidence that these changes persist after the pandemic disruptions ended.

DRUID Working Paper Doi: https://conference.druid.dk/ac_papers/mpnr57zxbe9tue0oqkr14ng6c6nh7c.pdf

Early-stage investing relationships have been predicated on face-to-face interaction, in part to mitigate inherent information asymmetries. However, the global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden, large-scale move to digital operations, thus questioning previous assumptions about physical location. We exploit the unprecedented move to digital delivery of accelerator cohorts, where investors are exposed to large numbers of startups for potential deals. We leverage a novel, deal-level dataset of 63,660 deals spanning 5,691 financing rounds, 1,630 startups and 8326 investors. The data comprises 30 accelerator programs focused on ‘green shift’ innovation and sustainability from 2018-2023. Results point to the digital shift paradoxically broadening the investor and startup base while also increasing agency concerns. We find evidence that these changes persist after the pandemic disruptions ended.

Industry and Innovation 31(5) p. 533-543 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13662716.2024.2346315

Established organisations and new ventures search for knowledge in the face of disruption. The activation of corporate-startup collaborations facilitates access to new and complementary knowledge. This type of collaboration has become increasingly popular as a corporate response to technological and market disruptions. However, there is growing evidence of the multiplicity of outcomes, intrinsically related to the broad diversity of forms and collaboration models. In this special issue, we include five contributions that give an overview of the phenomenon. We explore theoretical lenses that help us understand the potential tensions emerging from asymmetrical inter-organisational collaborations and possible solutions to make those collaborations successful. We delineate the theoretical and practical contributions of the papers and summarise the research opportunities that emerge around a phenomenon that keeps evolving.

Proceedings and Membership Directory - Academy of Management 2023(1) Doi: https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2023.18912symposium

Strategic Management Society (SMS) Annual Meeting, San Francisco

Novel ideas face a gauntlet of impediments along the path from possibility to potential profitability. Acceptance of novel ideas entails tradeoffs between conceptual importance and potential economic value. Patents are a window into novel ideas. Yet even established firms have difficulty commercializing inventions into novel innovations. A conundrum for scholars is: how tightly linked are patents and innovative products or new companies founded around the underlying invention? This paper uses language embedded in patents to trace how novelty is expressed in subsequent technological, investor, and market-facing contexts using natural language processing. This paper algorithmically explores the linguistic similarity between patent texts and commercially relevant innovation in novel products brought to market by corporate venture capital investors and novel ideas embedded in investor-facing IPO prospectus documents.

Strategic Management Society (SMS) Annual Meeting 2025, San Francisco

Early-stage investing relationships have been predicated on face-to-face interaction, in part to mitigate inherent information asymmetries. However, the global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden, large-scale move to digital operations, thus questioning previous assumptions about physical location. We exploit the unprecedented move to digital delivery of accelerator cohorts, where investors are exposed to large numbers of startups for potential deals. We leverage a novel, deal-level dataset of 63,660 deals spanning 5,691 financing rounds, 1,630 startups and 8326 investors. The data comprises 30 accelerator programs focused on ‘green shift’ innovation and sustainability from 2018-2023. Results point to the digital shift paradoxically broadening the investor and startup base while also increasing agency concerns. We find evidence that these changes persist after the pandemic disruptions ended.

Trust and Social Networks Conference

Abstract: Platform ecosystems in which a central orchestrator engages diverse actors for value creation, differ from traditional interorganizational networks in their impetus, governance, and interactions among actors. Research on platform ecosystems has considered these implications but has underexplored the role of trust. We consider trust as a key enabler of value creation in platform ecosystems and explore how ecosystem members build trust and why it may get eroded. By doing so, we highlight the multilateral interactions involving the platform orchestrator and ecosystem members as well as their implications for the emergence, spillover, and breach of trust in platform ecosystems. Furthermore, we discuss means by which trust can be nurtured and reinstituted, underscoring the distinction from established research on trust in interorganizational networks. We illustrate our theoretical framework for trust-building and erosion in platform ecosystems with the Cambridge Analytica case, explicating its implications for Facebook’s ecosystem, and informing future research.

Wharton Technology & Innovation Conference 2025

Early-stage investing relationships have been predicated on face-to-face interaction, in part to mitigate inherent information asymmetries. However, the global onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden, large-scale move to digital operations, thus questioning previous assumptions about physical location. We exploit the unprecedented move to digital delivery of accelerator cohorts, where investors are exposed to large numbers of startups for potential deals. We leverage a novel, deal-level dataset of 49,897 deals spanning 5,054 financing rounds, 1,442 startups and 4,817 investors. The data is comprised of 30 accelerator programs focused on ‘green shift’ innovation and sustainability from 2018-2023. Results point to the digital shift paradoxically broadening the investor and startup base while also increasing agency concerns. We find evidence that these changes persist after the pandemic disruptions ended.

Strategy Science Conference