About

Sonali Shah is an Associate Professor and IDEA Course Co-Director at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is involved in biomedical and translational sciences, with a focus on health innovation. Her academic responsibilities include teaching courses related to entrepreneurship, business policy, strategy, and innovation, indicating her expertise in integrating business principles with medical and biomedical education. Her role encompasses fostering interdisciplinary research and education aimed at reengineering medicine through innovative approaches. Specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions are not provided in the page text.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Industrial organization
• Marketing
• Knowledge management
• Business
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Knowledge and New Venture Innovation

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  This panel symposium aims to answer the question of “What is the role of knowledge in shaping new venture innovation?” We invite four scholars who have advanced the field to answer this question from various angles. Topics include 1) How does knowledge drive the creation of new ventures and innovative activities? 2) How is knowledge gained, transferred, and aggregated in new ventures? 3) How do new ventures utilize and recreate knowledge? 4) What roles do established firms and entrepreneurial ventures play in knowledge transfer and creation? and, most importantly, 5) How should we study new ventures and innovation? The goal of this symposium is to identify the assumptions in the current literature about the role of knowledge in established innovative firms and propose how these assumptions shift when applied to entrepreneurial ventures.

  PublisherDOI

• New Frontiers on User Communities: Interaction Dynamics and Content

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  In this symposium, we take stock of existing literature on online user communities and move forward for future research opportunities. Prior research has attempted to understand online user communities through investigating individual users that contribute. Researchers have focused on the individual users’ characteristics as well as their motivation. Amidst this development in research, online community scholars have begun to investigate the interactive dynamics within communities. In this symposium, we suggest that understanding the interaction dynamics within and between the community and its contents provides opportunities for future research. Our three empirical papers examine how the interactions impact organizational behavior, cognition, and outcomes. They also open up new avenues for scholars interested in online communities. We contribute to the Strategic Management (STR) and Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) division. Co-evolutionary Lock-in in External Search: Selection Consistency and Idea Variety Author: Sanghyun Park; INSEAD Author: Linus Dahlander; ESMT European School of Management and Technology Author: Henning Piezunka; INSEAD Structural Network Echo Chambers: The effect of Communication Networks on Linguistic Culture Author: Matthew Yeaton; HEC Paris Communication, Conflicts, and Innovation: The Effect of Heated Communication on Contributions in OCs Author: Jay (Jinwon) Park; U. of California, Irvine Author: John Joseph; U. of California, Irvine

  PublisherDOI

• The YieldWise Approach to Post-Harvest Loss Reduction: Creating Market-Driven Supply Chains to Support Sustained Technology Adoption

  Agriculture · 2023-04-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Excessively high levels of post-harvest loss often are a feature of agricultural systems dominated by small-holder farmers. However, this situation is something of a paradox, as technologies exist that have been shown in field demonstrations to substantially reduce post-harvest loss. What explains this paradox? Building on insights derived from the Rockefeller Foundation’s YieldWise Initiative, this article proposes that while reducing post-harvest loss generally does require technology adoption by small-holder farmers, market-driven supply chains are essential to the sustained use of those technologies. We illustrate this approach using in-depth interview data collected from the YieldWise participants belonging to the Iringa Hope Cooperative in Tanzania. Data on the benefits and challenges of such an approach are provided from the perspective of the small-holder farmer. In addition, we model the economic benefits associated with this approach.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spinning an entrepreneurial career: Motivation, attribution, and the development of organizational capabilities

  Strategic Management Journal · 2023-11-30 · 16 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract Research Summary We inductively examine how the careers of employee entrepreneurs unfold, uncovering the role of motives and attribution for failure. Founders expressing organizational misalignment motives for leaving established organizations engaged in “venture crafting” whereby they actively sought to build well‐functioning organizations. They built successful initial ventures and careers. Founders lacking organizational misalignment motives generally founded initial ventures that failed: however, those making internal attributions altered their behaviors and built successful careers; in contrast, founders making external attributions continued founding unsuccessful ventures. These findings suggest that building organizational capabilities—and not merely inheriting capabilities from existing organizations—is a cornerstone of building successful entrepreneurial careers. Our findings are based on detailed career history and archival data on employee entrepreneurs in the disk‐drive industry. Managerial Summary Our study follows careers of individuals leaving employment to create ventures, providing insights for entrepreneurs and managers. Though entrepreneurs often choose to focus solely on building a stellar product, our study underscores the importance of crafting well‐functioning organizations for career and venture success. Moreover, in case where initial ventures fail, founders who make internal attribution generate a “second chance” at success, whether as serial entrepreneurs or by returning to paid employment. Those who attribute failure to external factors, however, repeat their mistakes. For managers, our study reveals that the genesis of successful entrepreneurial careers is rooted in organizational deficiencies that prevent talented employees from thriving as intrapreneurs. The venture crafters typically left their jobs only after attempts to amend these issues were unsuccessful.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• New Venture Creation: A Process-Oriented Approach

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Entrepreneurship is a central economic driver that leads to technological advancements and new business opportunities. But entrepreneurship is an arena fraught with uncertainty, and entrepreneurs have to make a variety of decisions under these uncertain conditions. There are a number of pillars important to the process of building a new venture – the motivation, the team, and the idea itself. Taken under uncertain conditions, the decisions about these elements are fundamental strategic decisions that impact the outcomes for the new venture and dictate the potential direction new ventures may take. Perhaps the highest uncertainty could be attributed to the very early stages of the new venture creation process, given that there are too many moving factors, especially the idea and the team. Despite a number of studies documenting the various stages of the new venture creation process, there is a dearth of studies that zoom into the very early stages of the new venture creation process and understand how the decisions made during these early stages about the fundamental building blocks affect the new venture outcomes. Studying the very early stages of the venture creation process could provide critical insights that can potentially inform the strategic decisions that entrepreneurs have to make. Through the presentations and discussion in the proposed symposium, which involves both conceptual and empirical studies and both qualitative and quantitative studies, we aim to shed light on the various decisions at the very early stage of the process of new venture creation and the potential outcomes of these decisions for the new venture. The Role of Motivation & Attribution in Shaping the Careers of Employee Entrepreneurs Author: Sonali Shah; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Do Scientific Entrepreneurs Invest Financial Resources Differently? Evidence From Two RCTs Author: Chiara Spina; INSEAD Author: Daniele Battaglia; ESCP Business School Adaptations in New Ventures: The Dynamic Process of Entrepreneurial Team Formation Author: Moran Lazar; Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv U. Author: Gilad Chen; U. of Maryland Talking Past Each Other: Asymmetric Preferences, Construct Level and Entrepreneurial Team Formation Author: Steven Gray; U. of Texas at Austin Author: Travis Howell; Arizona State U. Author: Esther Sackett; Santa Clara U. A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Teams: The Role of Team Validation Author: DEVIKA RAJ; Bocconi U.

  PublisherDOI

• An image of industry: exploring the effects of knowledge sources in the medical imaging industry

  Industrial and Corporate Change · 2023-12-11 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract Scholars have long been interested in understanding how a firm’s “pre-history” shapes its behavior and performance, with recent scholarship highlighting the fact that industry entrants stem from different knowledge sources. Knowledge sources, the context in which entrants develop the knowledge they bring as they enter an industry, are argued to be important, because they may have differential effects on firm strategy and performance. We explore the effects of five different knowledge sources on firm behavior and survival using a mixed-methods approach. Survival analysis shows that user-founded new ventures outsurvive academic-founded new ventures, employee-founded new ventures, related diversifying entrants, and unrelated diversifying entrants. Qualitative analysis suggests that user-founded new ventures often enter niche markets defined by the clinical expertise of their founders and remain in these markets over time, honing their product offerings to specific clinical needs. Our analyses are based on novel, hand-collected archival data on the population of entrants in the modern medical imaging industry. We discuss the implications of these findings for the evolutionary theory, strategic management, and entrepreneurship literatures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Factors associated with matching to a dermatology residency

  Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology · 2022-04-16 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Spinning an Entrepreneurial Career: The Role of Motivation & Attribution in Shaping Follow-On Careers of Employee Entrepreneurs

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Voices and choices: How education influences the career choices of young disabled people

  Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling · 2022-05-08 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Not available

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From Ideas to Impact: The Process and Promise of Democratized Innovation in Healthcare

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022-07-06

  articleSenior author

  Decentralized, distributed systems of innovation and production are becoming ever more economically and strategically important. This has prompted a surge of interest among strategy and organizations scholars, with rich bodies of work emerging around open innovation, platforms, ecosystems, the sharing economy, user innovation, and more. One recent, yet understudied manifestation of this broader trend is the maker movement, which refers to collaborative communities of amateur and professional fabricators and tinkerers that have emerged over the past two decades. The goal of this symposium is to explore the technologies and practices associated with this community from a processual perspective, specifically in the context of healthcare innovation. We do so by showcasing cutting-edge unpublished work from top scholars publishing in the areas of technology, organizational learning, and entrepreneurship. These papers adopt different theoretical perspectives and levels of analysis to explore a set of closely-related, under-researched, and important questions: How can teams use “democratizing” technologies to identify new opportunities, and how can emergent organizations enact those ideas to create value? How do distributed, collaborative network structures emerge, and how does knowledge flow through them over time? Collectively, these papers draw insights from user innovation and the maker movement context to advance research and theory on entrepreneurship, legitimacy, ecosystems, and organizational emergence. Following the four papers, an expert discussant will synthesize emergent insights, and we will conclude with an exercise in “democratized innovation” of our own, using a group exercise to crowdsource a collective future research agenda. How maker tools can accelerate ideation Presenter: Sarah Lebovitz; U. of Virginia Pandemic makers: Emergent networks of citizen crisis response Presenter: Russell E. Browder; U. of Oklahoma Price College of Business Presenter: Angela Forgues; U. of Wisconsin Presenter: Stella Seyb; U. of Oklahoma Presenter: Howard Aldrich; U. of North Carolina Emergence of a grassroots ecosystem in response to the PPE supply crisis Presenter: Douglas Hannah; Boston U. Presenter: Ya-Ching Huang; Boston U. Stoking the flames of innovation: Differential knowledge contributions in medical imaging Presenter: Uisung David Park; Syracuse U. Presenter: Shinjinee Chattopadhyay; U. of Illinois Presenter: Sonali Shah; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rajshree Agarwal

  26 shared

• Serguey Braguinsky

  University of Maryland, College Park

  13 shared

• Mark Priestley

  12 shared

• Marc Gruber

  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

  9 shared

• Hyeonsuh Lee

  West Virginia University

  9 shared

• John C. Dencker

  Universidad del Noreste

  7 shared

• Mahka Moeen

  6 shared

• Audra Wormald

  6 shared