Soomi Kim
About Me
Welcome! I am a PhD candidate at MIT Sloan in the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management group. 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.
In July 2023, I will be joining the Management Division at Columbia Business School as an Assistant Professor.
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.
Working Papers
- "Shortcuts to Innovation: The Use of Analogies in Knowledge Production." Job Market Paper.
- ▸ Click here to open abstract
- "Is the Patent System Sensitive to Incorrect Information?" (with Janet Freilich). 2nd-round revisions requested, The Review of Economics and Statistics.
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.