Dan J Wang

Biography

Dan Wang is Associate Professor of Business and (by courtesy) Sociology at Columbia Business School, where he is also the incoming Faculty Co-Director of the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise. His research examines how social networks drive social and economic transformation through the analysis of global migration, social movements, organizational innovation, and entrepreneurship. He teaches the core MBA Strategy Formulation course, an elective MBA course on Technology Strategy, a PhD seminar on Organizational Theory. He also teaches in several Executive Education programs on Social Networks and Technology Strategy. He earned his BA from Columbia University (Columbia College) and PhD from Stanford University.

He received the 2020 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Core and the 2018 Singhvi Prize for Scholarship in the Classroom, Columbia Business School’s top teaching honor conferred by the graduating MBA class. He was also named to Poets and Quants’ 2018 list of “Best 40 Business School Professors under 40.” In 2021, he received the Robert W. Lear Service Award, given by the graduating class for his commitment to the MBA student body.

Wang’s research lies at the intersection of business and society with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. One of his main research streams focuses on the global migration of high-skilled individuals. Specifically, Wang studies “reverse brain drain”, or how the return migration of skilled professionals spreads ideas, technologies, and new ventures to different parts of the world. Another research area focuses on how social protest and activism create an interface between business and society. In this work, Wang has analyzed collaboration networks across social movements to predict innovation, knowledge sharing, strategic choices, and protest scope across activist groups. Finally, in on-going work on entrepreneurship, he has analyzed the implications of different network structures of venture capital syndication for the innovation output and financial performance of start-ups.

His work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Social Forces, Social Networks, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and Theory and Society. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Strategic Management Journal and Special Issue Editor for Organization Science and has served as a Consulting Editor for The American Journal of Sociology. He is co-editor of the book series, Elements in the Structural Analysis of Culture, Social Organization, and History with Cambridge University Press. His work has been cited in The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR and has been recognized with multiple awards from the Academy of Management. He has also been awarded both the Dissertation (2012) and Junior Faculty Fellowship (2017) from the Kauffman Foundation. He has also contributed to practitioner-oriented publications such as Strategy+Business, and written Op-Eds for CNN.

Areas of Expertise

• China, Emerging Markets, Innovation, International Business, Multinational Corporations