Rembrand Koning

Rem Koning is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Koning studies how managers and entrepreneurs discover new ways to create value. His work explores how bias in how we discover hinders firm performance, leads managers to overlook promising new practices and talent, and drives inequities in who benefits from innovation and competition. However, his research also shows how companies can counter biases in discovery to build better strategies and more inclusive innovations.

To understand how firms and entrepreneurs discover his work builds on ideas from a range of disciplines, including sociology, economics, and business strategy. It also relies on a range of methods, including randomized control trials (RCTs), text analysis, and machine learning approaches. He has studied entrepreneurs and firms worldwide and in various industry contexts, including online startups, scientific discovery, biomedical innovation, and retail trade. His papers have explored how social skills improve matching and diffusion in small business advice networks, how A/B testing enables the discovery of product-market fit, how male-dominated online platforms can distort the direction of product innovation away from the needs of women, how shifts in the boundary of the firm have led US companies to miss out on diverse talent, and how the demographic background of innovators impacts who benefits from innovation.

He teaches strategy and entrepreneurship to executives and MBA students. His work has appeared in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Research Policy, the Papers & Proceedings of the American Economic Association, the Journal of Organizational Design, and the American Sociological Review. It has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Vox, the New York Times, and Forbes. Professor Koning earned his Ph. D. at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received a Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. He graduated from the University of Chicago with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics.