Henning Piezunka

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ABOUT ME

  • Profession. I am an Associate Professor at INSEAD & currently a Visiting Professor at Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Education. Ph.D. from Stanford, a Master from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE), and a Diplom-Kaufmann from the Universität Mannheim.

  • Background. Founder-CEO of a webdesign company. 25 full-time employees, customers in 80 countries. Sold in 2015. Biggest success: The company is still active and thriving.


TEACHING
My teaching is focused on Startups and Corporate Entrepreneurship. Simply said, I help entrepreneurs to manage better, and managers to be more entrepreneurial. I have received multiple Best Teacher Awards. I teach in the INSEAD MBA, the INSEAD Global Executive MBA (GEMBA), and an INSEAD Open Enrollment Program where I teach Entrepreneurship for one week (i.e., you can sign up here).


WEBINARS
I teach a free 3h-webinar on “Venture Capital, Business Angels, and Startups”. It has been attended by more than 25.000 people. There are two people who took it eleven times. I taught it 98 times. You can sign up here.


RESEARCH
For an overview of my academic papers, see my Academic CV. Funny story: the list of papers can be used to find something to read – not just to count.

In one stream of my research, I study how organizations can tap into the knowledge of their members. Doing so allows them to make better decisions, innovate more effectively, and be more inclusive. I draw on and contribute to research on crowdsourcing, organizational learning, search, wisdom of crowds, and information aggregation. My two core findings in this stream are that (1) despite adopting structures that should help them to be more inclusive, organizations often end up marginalizing the very members they need to hear from, and (2) that even if organizations only aim to tap into their members' knowledge, it is really a two-way street as organizations also shape their members’ knowledge. Some papers in this stream are:

In a second stream, I study how actors behave in collaborative and competitive relationships. In my endeavor to better understand what underlies the interactions between two actors, my research highlights the explanatory power of multiplex (i.e. parallelly occurring) relationships. Simply said, the key to understanding one relationship is often another relationship. Some papers in this stream are:

To study these topics, I rely on different methodologies, most notably large-scale archival data sets, computer simulations, and experiments. While my focus is on theory, I am fond of the empirical contexts of my research. These are (1) startups and tech companies, (2) family businesses, and (3) sports (e.g., Formula 1, soccer, and chess).

OTHER USEFUL AND INTERESTING STUFF

Don’t be a stranger. Write me: henning.piezunka@insead.edu