Ayfer Ali

Dr Ayfer Ali is a Lecturer in the Strategy and International Group at Warwick Business School. She has a PhD in Health Policy/Management from Harvard University/Harvard Business School and a BA with honors in Economics from Harvard College. Her research is focused on innovation and entrepreneurship in healthcare with special interest in the pharmaceutical industry. Her expertise is in markets for technology ? patenting and licensing of inventions in the pharma and biotech industries. She has been particularly interested in drug repurposing and user (physician and patient) innovation in health care. Most recently she has been studying the role of serendipity in the discovery of new drugs and new uses for existing drugs and the way in which serendipity can be harnessed for strategy development more generally.

Dr Ali's work has been published in top management journals such as Organization Science and Research Policy and has been featured in the Financial Times, the BBC and the Economist. Dr Ali received the 2013 Best Dissertation Award from the INFORMS Technology and Management Section and her work was nominated for a best paper award at the Strategic Management Society annual conference in 2012.

At WBS Dr Ali teaches in the Masters and MBA programs. Prior to coming to WBS, she taught at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain and worked at Analysis Group/Economics and Compass/Lexecon providing consulting services for industries as diverse as IT, credit cards, oil and gas and healthcare.

Research Interests

Heathcare Innovation, Markets for technology, Patents, Licensing, Pharmaceutical and Biotech Industries, Drug Repurposing, Physician Innovation, Serendipity in Strategy

Publications

Journal Articles

• Andriani, P., Ali, A. and Mastrogiorgio, M. (2017) "Measuring exaptation and its impact on innovation, search, and problem solving", Organization Science, 28, 2, 320-338
• Ali, A. and Gittelman, M. (2016) "Research paradigms and useful inventions in medicine : patents and licensing by teams of clinical and basic scientists in Academic Medical Centers", Research Policy, 45, 8, 1499-1511
• DeMonaco, H. J., Ali, A. and Hippel, E. v. (2006) "The major role of clinicians in the discovery of off-label drug therapies", Pharmacotherapy, 26, 3, 323-332
• Johnson, D. K. N. and Ali, A. (2004) "A tale of two seasons : participation and medal counts at the summer and winter Olympic games", Social Science Quarterly, 85, 4, 974-993