Keyvan Vakili

Dr Keyvan Vakili’s research is broadly focused on understanding the factors that promote creativity and innovation at the individual, team, organisation, and industry levels, using a variety of experimental and quasi-experimental designs, quantitative data methods and textual analysis.

He is currently focused on two research streams. Through his first research stream, he examines the relationship between collaboration and innovation. He is particularly interested in how innovators choose their collaborators, how the composition of innovative teams influence their creative output, how firms and innovative teams can address the tensions between generating novel versus useful innovations, and how the context of innovation moderates the relationship between team composition and creativity. With the second research stream, he studies the impact of various public policies such as federal funding and IP regime on the innovative performance of individuals, teams, and organisations.

So far Dr Vakili’s research has been focused on four empirical settings: digital media standards, stem cell research, nanotechnology, and semiconductors.

Before joining academia, he was an entrepreneur and worked as a consultant. In 2006, he founded a video game production company, which was acquired by Samsung Co, three years later. As a consultant, he worked with executives in a range of industries such as auto, oil, education, software and hardware. He specialised in topics of business modelling, systems thinking and organisational learning. He currently advises several startups in the fields of mobile apps, semiconductors, and online services.