Excerpt
August 2022, Paper: "We study resource allocation to early-stage ideas at an internal startup program of one the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. Our research design enables us to elicit every evaluator’s scores across five different attributes, before seeing how would allocate capital to the same ideas. We find that in resource allocation decisions, evaluators systematically penalized projects that they scored high on some attributes but low in others, compared to ones that they scored more equally on all dimensions. A consequence of this penalty was that ideas perceived as being high risk and high reward tended to lose out to projects considered relatively less transformational, but safer bets. Our results shed light on a potential mechanism for why novel ideas are handicapped in R&D funding: they may be systematically losing out in head-to-head resource allocation to ideas that are more balanced in their attributes even when the latter have less transformational potential."
Non-HKS Harvard Faculty Author Website - Joshua Krieger