Soomi Kim

About Me

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School in the Management Division. My research interests include the management of innovation and strategy. Specifically, I study shortcuts to innovation—what kind of shortcuts people take to innovate faster and what are the consequences of taking such shortcuts.

I received a PhD from MIT Sloan and a BA from Wellesley College.

Please find my CV here.

Publications

• "Insurance Design and Pharmaceutical Innovation" (with Leila Agha and Danielle Li). American Economic Review: Insights, June 2022: Vol. 4, No. 2.
• "Is the Patent System Sensitive to Incorrect Information?" (with Janet Freilich). Forthcoming, The Review of Economics and Statistics.

Working Papers

• "Shortcuts to Innovation: The Use of Analogies in Knowledge Production." Job Market Paper.
• ▸ Click here to open abstract
Old ideas serve as critical inputs into new ideas, but how do knowledge workers innovate when there are only few existing ideas to build on? In this paper, I explore how analogical reasoning—and technologies that automate it—can serve as "shortcuts" that allow innovators to import knowledge from an adjacent domain, bypassing the need to build knowledge from the ground up. Yet, because analogies require the availability of other domains as templates, they may also constrain the direction of innovation towards areas with available templates. Using the setting of structural biology, I document a tradeoff: while the arrival of an analogy-based technology increased the rate of innovation, it led to workers herding around solving less impactful problems.