About

Renee Rottner is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to her current position, she was an Assistant Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business in the department of Management and Organizations, where she taught leadership and entrepreneurship courses. Her research and teaching focus on innovation, specifically how innovators can improve the development of new ideas and new firms. She has examined the dynamics of innovation in various settings, including Caltech spinouts, NASA projects, semiconductor startups, and Federal nanotechnology initiatives, and is currently studying these dynamics in non-US contexts such as entrepreneurship in Japan and China, as well as micro-financed businesses in India. Dr. Rottner has received research funding from NASA and has earned best paper awards from several prestigious organizations. She has authored a book on the history of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and published articles in notable journals. With a background that includes working as an entrepreneur helping engineers and scientists commercialize ideas across military, R&D institutes, and universities, she holds a B.A. from Eastern Michigan University, an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Management from UC Irvine.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Business
• Political science
• Public relations
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• The valorization of employment: How communities and founders shape new venture outcomes

  Journal of Business Venturing · 2026-02-18

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• AI and the Digital Divide

  2025-04-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter, we examine how artificial intelligence (AI) can either bridge or exacerbate educational disparities, depending on its implementation. We begin by analyzing the impact of technology access, digital literacy, and algorithmic bias on the digital divide. The discussion then shifts to how AI can be customized for diverse learners and the evolving policy frameworks that govern its use. Emphasizing equity and inclusiveness, the chapter argues that effective AI deployment in education requires substantial investments in technology, educator training, and ethical guidelines, ensuring that all students benefit equally from AI-powered learning tools.

  PublisherDOI

• Organizations in the New Space Era: A New Frontier for Organizing, Technology, and Power Dynamics

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  Research on the prior era of space activity has advanced our understanding of learning from failures, project management, and new forms of innovation. The new space era is upon us - distinguished by new forms of organizing where private sector organizations like Elon Musk's SpaceX are partners with government agencies, not only suppliers and contractors. The new era raises many fascinating organizational questions from the unprecedented new technologies and organizational forms that create them, to new power dynamics of public-private-partnerships, to the ideologies in play from wealthy entrepreneurs with unprecedented influence. It also invites us to revisit non-market strategies of corporations and implications for grand challenges and sustainability. This symposium aims to advance understanding of organizations in the new space era and inspire future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Iterative Learning: Using AI-Bots in Negotiation Training

  2024-08-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract SUBMISSION TYPE: PRACTICE PAPER / WIP Negotiation skills are essential in management education and in engineering practice. Traditional teaching paradigms, centered around role-playing activities, often meet challenges, especially when students are unprepared or unable to simulate their roles authentically. To addressing this pedagogical gap, I developed "AdVentures with chatGPT." In this two-round negotiation exercise, students assume the roles of job candidates, negotiating terms with an AI-bot recruiter. The AI facilitates the first negotiation round, providing students immediate, objective feedback upon completion. Students reflect on their performance, identify improvements and strategies, before re-engaging in the second negotiation round with the AI. In a pilot study, there was an average improvement of 10% in student performance. Further research is needed to confirm this finding. However, based on these early results, the use of AI is promising for teaching students to create and claim value in negotiation. This AI-enabled, iterative approach contributes to the pedagogical toolbox in engineering management education, offering a technologically advanced, scalable solution to negotiation training.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond the Pale Blue Dot: Theoretical and Empirical Research Opportunity in the Space Economy

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Once dominated by state-run entities, the space industry is experiencing a significant transformation and the emergence of the “space economy.” Entailing the exploration, development, and utilization of outer space, the space economy encompasses a wide range of commercial, scientific, as well as private and government activities that take place beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The space economy includes various sectors and industries, such as satellite manufacturing, launch, and communications, space tourism, research and development, and the potential for resource extraction from celestial bodies (e.g., asteroid mining). The primary objective of this proposed panel symposium is to accelerate research engagement on the intricacies of the space economy. To achieve this, we bring a diverse group of experts from several management sub-fields, including entrepreneurship, corporate strategy, ecosystem management, business policy, innovation, and corporate venture capital. We seek to (1) expose AOM attendees to insights gleaned from these experts regarding research challenges and opportunities in the space economy; and (2) provide multifaceted perspectives on the development of innovative theories and methods for shaping future research in this area. Aligned with the overarching theme of AOM 2024 Chicago, “Innovating for the Future,” this symposium will contribute to our understanding of the “untamed problems” inherent in exploring an emerging domain, called the space economy.

  PublisherDOI

• Humanistic approaches to change: Entrepreneurship and transformation

  Business History · 2023-05-26 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Social transformation is core to the idea of entrepreneurship, yet it plays a minor role in entrepreneurship research. We explore humanistic approaches to change by building on the Schumpeterian perspective of transformation/creative destruction and expanding it in three critical ways. First, we argue that entrepreneurship and history should engage methodologically with transformation ‘as a perspective’ taken by the researcher or observer. Second, we contend that to explore the process of entrepreneurial transformation historically, it is necessary to engage in a broader conceptualisation of temporality. Third, we posit that to fully grasp transformation, we ought to study not just the reconfiguration of material resources that Schumpeter has proposed but also the immaterial (intellectual and imaginative) re-evaluations that trigger social transformation, thus focussing on the semantics of transformation. The articles in this Special Issue explore entrepreneurship and transformation through these three lenses, making social transformation more central to historical entrepreneurship research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Feeling Left Out: Revising Business School History and Inserting Lyrical Sociology

  Academy of Management Learning and Education · 2021-06-24 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As management education has become more global, the experiences that we draw upon for our research and teaching often do not reflect this diversity. In this essay, I examine what counted as experie...

  PublisherDOI

• From Old / New Space to Smart Space: changing ecosystems of space innovation

  Entreprises et histoire · 2021-05-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• From Old / New Space to Smart Space: changing ecosystems of space innovation

  Entreprises et histoire · 2021-05-21 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Dans les dernière décennies, l’organisation sociale du secteur spatial s’est transformée, à l’image de changements dans les priorités politiques puis de nouvelles possibilités commerciales. Cependant les commentaires courants sous-évaluent la variété et la répartition des voies par lesquelles les changements s’opèrent. Nous proposons un cadre empirique qui cartographie cette distribution en considérant : les évolutions des objectifs de l’activité spatiale, les catégories dont relèvent les organisations issues de différents secteurs, l’organisation des missions et projets et de la gouvernance du secteur. Nous nous appuyons sur les études des écosystèmes d’affaires et d’innovation et recourons au concept d’écosystème pouur cartographier des changements significatifs dans le secteur selon plusieurs axes. Notre approche invite à reconsidérer les clivages politiques habituels. En effet l’emploi dynamique du concept d’innovation met en évidence l’influence d’une orientation vers l’exploration ou l’exploitation, la coopération ou la compétition, la durabilité ou la raréfaction des ressources environnementales que ce soit de manière intentionnelle ou non.

  PublisherDOI

• The Legacy of the Samurai: how conflict between shareholder and stakeholder logics in communities affect ventures

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-09-25

  articleOpen access

  In this study, we explore how institutional complexity in communities shapes the strategic orientation of new ventures. Drawing on a dataset of Japanese ventures, we explore how firms exhibit strategic orientations associated with stakeholder versus shareholder logics as exhibited by the pursuit of employment growth versus financial growth. We exploit large urban environments where a Western shareholder logic became dominant over the traditional stakeholder logic. We find that increasing community engagement results in employment gains associated with the underlying stakeholder logic. We further find that these effects are moderated by the existence of a founder-CEO who is from an urban context. Conceptualizing community engagement and founder habitus as different forms of embeddedness, we show that community engagement fosters an employment-focused strategic orientation only when aligned with the logics of the founder’s origin. We discuss the implications of our findings for scholarship at the interface of institutions and entrepreneurship, and how the content of embeddedness shapes the effects of institutions and the strategic orientations of new venture.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Robert Eberhart

  5 shared

• Claudia Bird Schoonhoven

  4 shared

• David Seidl

  University of Zurich

  4 shared

• Christine M. Beckman

  4 shared

• Sang‐Joon Kim

  4 shared

• Michael Lounsbury

  University of Alberta

  3 shared

• William B. Gartner

  Babson College

  2 shared

• Julia Hautz

  Universität Innsbruck

  2 shared

Education

• Doctorate, Merage School of Business

  University of California Irvine

  2011

• Master, Management Science & Engineering

  Stanford University

  2004

Awards & honors

• Best Paper Award from the Strategic Management Society
• Best Paper Award from the Academy of Management
• Best Paper Award from the Institute for Operations Research…
• Best Paper Award from the Society for the Advancement of Man…