My name is Henning Piezunka. I am from Heidelberg, Germany. I am an Associate Professor at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.  Before joining INSEAD, I got a PhD at Stanford University, a Master of Science at the London School of Economics (UK), and a Diplom Kaufmann from  the University of Mannheim (Germany). Before joining academia I was an entrepreneur.  I co-founded a company in 1998, which served clients in more than 80 countries and had 25 people full time employees before I sold it in 2015.  Having a background as an entrepreneur continues to finrom my research and my teaching. For more information about me see my Academic CV.

I teach the class "New Business Ventures". The class is about how to transform an idea into a business. I have gotten the Deans' Commendation for Excellence in MBA Teaching almost every year I taught, won the INSEAD Best Teacher Award four times and was featured on Poets & Quants as a favorite business school professor as well as one of the 40 under 40 best business school professors. You can take my class as part of the INSEAD MBA or the INSEAD Global Executive MBA. You can also just take my class as an Open Enrollment Program where you simply come to INSEAD for a week. You can apply here.

Teaching - Free INSEAD webinar on Venture Capital, Business Angels, and Startups

I teach a free webinar on Venture Capital, Business Angels, and Startups. More than 16.000 people have already taken the live webinar. You can read some reviews here on LinkedIn. You can learn more about it, find upcoming dates, and register here.

Teaching - Entrepreneurship Class at INSEAD  

Whether people and businesses are successful depends on their ability to cooperate and to compete. I study cooperation and competition, and am particularly interested when the two co-occur.

For an overview of my research, you can check my profile on ResearchGate, Google Scholar, or my Academic CV. Funny story, the list of articles on my CV can be used to find an article to read not just to be counted. 

Research - Highlight Reel

LEARNING BY PARTICIPATING

We all know learning-by-doing. You make a decision, get feedback on that decision, and learn what outcome is associated with that kind of decision. But for people working in organizations (like most of us) learning is different. In organizations people do not necessarily make a decision - they participate in the decision making process. This has a key implication: the decision you favor is not necessarily the decision the organization makes. So, you do not get feedback on "your decision”, but on the organization’s decision. That changes how you learn and what you learn.

The power of rejections

You need to be pretty desperate to study rejections. Well, my co-author Linus Dahlander and I decided to study rejections and initially our work on rejections got …. rejected. Eventually our research got accepted and even won awards. If you are good in saying no, you can focus on the right things - and you can still maintain the relationship to people you say no to.

What to do with The Crazy ones, the misfits, the troublemakers …. the Contrarians

“Here is to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers …”. Rightfully people who think different are celebrated - nowhere more so than in the famous Apple commercial. But as great as it sounds, it can be challenging to have a contrarian colleague in your organization. What should you do if someone thinks differently all the time. In a recent paper my-authors and I show why organizations can and should leverage contrarians.

Piezunka, H., V. Aggarwal, & H. Posen “The Aggregation-Learning Tradeoff“ Organization Science, forthcoming

Is your supplier any good?

Your business relies on your suppliers - but it can be difficult to assess a supplier. While you have a good understanding of the performance of your product, it can be difficult to attribute how much of the performance is due to a particular components by a supplier. It is thus unclear if a supplier helps you or hinders you to perform better. David Clough and I wanted to understand how managers deal with this challenge - and we found out. In our study of Formula 1 managers, we found that the secret in assessing suppliers lies in more wholistic view of the network where managers also study the performance of others relying on the same supplier.

Clough, D. & H. Piezunka “Tie Dissolution in Market Networks: A Theory of Vicarious Performance Feedback” Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. 65(4), 972-1017 (Summary article on INSEAD Knowledge)

Piezunka, H., V. Aggarwal, & H. Posen “The Aggregation-Learning Tradeoff“ Organization Science, forthcoming

Piezunka, H., & L. Dahlander “Idea rejected, tie formed - Organizations' feedback on crowdsourced ideas" Academy of Management Journal. 62(2) 503-530
(Article on INSEAD Knowledge) - Researchers interested in the methodology can download some of the code we used here.

SUCCESSION IN FAMILY FIRMS

Succession are complicated. They are particularly complicated in family firms because the succession does not only disrupt the business - but also the family. In a long term study of family firms, my co-author Jamber Li and I found out how family firms can successfully manage such transitions.

Research - Overview

SO MANY NEW IDEAS …… BUT THEN YOU DO THE SAME OLD STUFF

Crowdsourcing is a great way to get new ideas. It is, however, also challenging and organizations often fail to do so. Linus Dahlander, Lars Bo Jeppesen, and I have developed a process model of how organization can

Dahlander, L., L.B. Jeppesen, & H. Piezunka. 2018 “How organizations manage crowds: Define, broadcast, attract and select” Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 64, 239-270
(Article on INSEAD Knowledge)

HOW TO CROWDSOURCE?

COMPETITION ESCALATING INTO CONFLICT

When does competition escalate into conflict? It is not easy to study as conflict is typically not well documented. Together with my co-authors, I found a way. We study collision before Formula 1 drivers. We predict when they are most likely to collide with one another.

Piezunka, H., W, Lee, R. Haynes, & M. Bothner “Escalation of competition into conflict in competitive networks of Formula One drivers" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(Coverage in various news outlets 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29) (Article on INSEAD Knowledge, Article on Harvard Business Review Online, Blog post by Henrich Greve)

Organization often generate lots of news ideas - but they still end up working on old non-innovative ideas. Linus Dahlander and I tried to figure out why that is. We studied organizations that crowdsource ideas. While having many new ideas and working on old ideas seems paradoxical, we found the two to be causally related. Having many new ideas makes it challenging to pay attention to all of them - and particularly hard to new ideas.

Musings on Academic Careers

I have collected  job market advice on how to be a good PhD student and to succeed on the job market.

Code sharing

The code and an explanation of the code Linus Dahlander and I used for text analysis in our work on crowdsourcing can be found here.

Interview with Venture Capitalist Randy Komisar (Kleiner Perkins)

Randy Komisar is an incredible insightful executive and investor. When he came to the INSEAD Fontaineblau campus, we did a mixture of a fireside chat and keynote. You can watch it here.

Interview with Geoff Ralston - President Y Combinator

Geoff Ralston, an alumni of the INSEAD MBA program and president of Y Combinator, is a very accomplished entrepreneur and investor. When he came to INSEAD we discussed various questions. You can see some videos above. You can find the complete playlist here.