Wendy Bradley

I am an Assistant Professor of Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Business Economics in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas​. My research is in technological innovation, strategic management, and entrepreneurship.

I study how technological disruption affects firm strategies for protecting and commercializing innovation in the digital economy. This work is motivated by my previous professional experience as a financial consultant for a variety of litigation and transactional law firms in the U.S. and abroad.

I obtained my PhD in Strategy and Business Policy from HEC Paris. My advisor at HEC Paris is Dr. Thomas Åstebro. ​For over two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I worked with Dr. Scott Stern at the MIT Sloan School of Management and with Dr. Shane Greenstein at the Harvard Business School on my job market paper. Last year, I worked as the Policy Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School.

​My research stems from the idea that digitization has changed the nature of invention. Instead of products you hold in your hand, invisible bits and bytes are stored on your computer. This has made the reproduction and distribution of digital goods by online communities much easier and, as a result, the protection and commercialization of these goods by firms much harder to achieve.

In light of technological disruption due to digitization, new institutions have emerged that are both (1) illicit and organically grown, like digital piracy, and (2) explicit and government-mandated, such as patent pools. My research looks at the effects of these institutions on subsequent innovation and what this means for businesses and society. The challenge for current research in innovation, strategic management, and entrepreneurship is the causal identification of new and often hard-to-measure digital phenomenon. My research contributes to this literature by introducing multiple unique datasets that I collected over the past two years, and by combining old and new measures for innovation, from patents to product-level output.

My research raises new questions for strategic management, organizational behavior of online communities, media management, law for entrepreneurship, and growth theory.

Teaching

• STRA 5370 Strategic Management in a Global Economy

Research

• Strategy
• Entrepreneurship
• Intellectual Property
• Technological Innovation
• Digital Economy
• Venture Capital