Beedie School of Business News

Research from two Beedie School of Business PhD students has become a top paper on the subject of open innovation for 2013, with almost 500 downloads on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a leading repository of business academic papers.

The paper, “The Theory of Crowd Capital”, was authored by Beedie PhD students Prashant Shukla and John Prpić, and examines the increasing number of organizations using IT to engage dispersed populations of individuals for knowledge purposes. Through exploration of the theory of Crowd Capital, it generalizes a new theory to explain how and why rapidly growing IT phenomena such as crowdsourcing, citizen science, wikis, and prediction markets are occurring.

The research has garnered significant interest from both the practitioner and academic communities, being listed at the popular online innovation community IdeaConnection, and receiving positive feedback from academics across the globe, including blogs by scholars from both Harvard and Tufts. Keep reading…

Tags: Beedie School of Business, Crowd Capital, Harvard, IdeaConnection, John Prpić, Open Innovation, PhD, Prashant Shukla, sfu, Social Science Research Network, SSRN, Tufts

VANCOUVER– A ranking of international business schools has rated the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University as among the best in the world for business and management research.

The measure, published by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a leading repository of business academic papers, shows that based on article downloads by institution, Beedie ranks 54th in the world out of more than 1000 business schools included in the survey.

According to Beedie School of Business Dean Daniel Shapiro, the school’s ranking can be attributed to the Beedie faculty’s prolific output, which focuses on key strategic areas such as innovation and technology, sustainability, international business and capital markets.

“This ranking is yet another measure that highlights the significant impact of our research,” said Shapiro. “It is a testament to both the breadth and depth of our faculty’s research output that we are able to rate so highly.”

SSRN was established in 1994 by Michael Jensen, a financial economist at Harvard Business School. In a 2008 New York Times profile, SSRN was held up for being “increasingly influential” in academic circles. According to the article, “With a precision common to the digital age, its rankings of downloads can be sliced and diced in many ways with only a click: most downloads over all or most downloads in the last 12 months, either by article, by author or by institution.”

The rankings can be viewed online at: http://hq.ssrn.com/rankings (free registration required)

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Tags: capital markets, Daniel Shapiro, entrepreneurship, Harvard Business School, innovation, international business, Michael Jensen, MIS, New York Times, social entrepreneurship, Social Science Research Network, SSRN, sustainability, technology