INFORMS: What inspired you to research this particular topic?

LEE: The link between industry characteristics and the distribution of firm profitability in an industry is a fundamental research topic in strategy. Industries’ potential for interdependency enriches our knowledge about industry characteristics and is relevant to managerial practice in understanding why industries vary in profit distributions.

INFORMS: Did any of your results surprise you?

LEE: Yes. The marginal effect of industries’ potential for interdependency on the average of firm profitability distribution (the first moment) in an industry is largest when the potential is at a moderate level. This finding has been established and is confirmed in our study. What surprised us is that the marginal effect on the variance of firm profitability distribution (the second moment) in an industry is also found to be largest when the potential is at a moderate level. That is, the relationship between interdependency and the variance of firm profitability distribution is concave: The variance increases with greater interdependency at a decreasing rate, and, at high levels of interdependency, the variance decreases with interdependency. We also found a concave relationship between interdependency and the skew of firm profitability distribution in an industry. The concave relationships we found are new, yet they are consistent with explanations based on performance landscape and complex adaptive systems.

INFORMS: What is the most important take-away you hope readers will learn from your paper?

LEE: The most important take-away that Mishari and I hope readers will learn from our paper is that industries vary in their potential for interdependency. The potential may change over time as technological components are recombined and refined, reflecting a process whereby agents (inventors and firms) search for innovation. The search is more successful at a moderate level of interdependency, when the relative rates of accumulation suggest a balance between recombination and refinement. The performance landscape has a large number of tall peaks and some peaks are clustered in a mountain range, providing the highest probability of finding useful combinations.

INFORMS: Tell us about the process of writing this paper.

LEE: The paper started as a training ground for my PhD student, Mishari. I asked Mishari to replicate important findings on the link between industries’ potential for interdependency and industry-level profit distributions. However, we don’t have access to the survey data that were used for constructing the independent variable. So, we created our own from patent data. As a result, Mishari gained valuable experience, and an index of industries’ potential for interdependency created from patent data is contributed to the public domain.

INFORMS: Why was it important for you to publish in Strategy Science?

LEE: Publishing in Strategy Science was important for us because replication and extension are encouraged by the editorial leadership. Our research greatly benefited from the insightful guidance and suggestions offered by senior editor Michael Lenox and two anonymous referees. We are grateful to Editor-in-Chief Daniel Levinthal for creating a distinctive intellectual space with Strategy Science through which thoughtful and decisive feedback and evaluation nurture impactful scholarship.

INFORMS: How do you yourself keep up-to-date on the latest research in your field?

LEE: I teach three PhD research seminars that are core courses of our PhD curriculum. By training and shaping the next-generation scholars, I keep up-to-date on the latest research in my field (as well as related fields).

INFORMS: Tell us a little about what you are working on now.

LEE: I am currently studying how technological interdependencies in the context of ecosystem affect innovation. My co-authors and I seek to advance a search-based theory of firms innovating within an ecosystem. The theory explains the positional advantage that may accrue to some firms over others, and how that advantage may be affected by the asymmetries in the payoff functions between upstream and downstream firms, and by the overall structure of the input-output flows in the ecosystem. This study contributes to the notion of cumulative innovation that has been traditionally conceptualized along the time dimension such as the S-shaped technology trajectory (e.g., Dosi 1982; Henderson 1995) and the recombining as well as the refining of technological components over time (e.g., Lee and Alnahedh 2016).

INFORMS: Tell us about how being a member of the Organization Science Section has impacted your professional life.

LEE: My first publication in an academic journal was in Organization Science. The status of Organization Science has helped the publication gain a lot of attention. The article is “From a Firm-Based to a Community-Based Model of Knowledge Creation: The Case of the Linux Kernel Development.” It continues to attract attention, even more than a decade after being published.

INFORMS: When you’re not using your OR superpowers to try to make the world a better place, what are some of the ways you like to spend your time?

LEE: I enjoy learning from intellectual discussions on podcasts such as Waking Up hosted by Sam Harris and EconTalk hosted by Russ Roberts, Library of Economics and Liberty.

INFORMS: As an INFORMS member, what benefit do you find most useful?

LEE: The benefit that I find most useful is the intellectual exchange with leading thinkers outside my area of research. The intellectual exchange plays a critical role in the invisible college that I construct for myself in sustaining my passion for research.

INFORMS: What advice would you give to your younger self?

LEE: Devote my time and effort toward my personal mission, firmly. My personal mission is to invest in and upgrade global human capital. This personal mission of mine seeks to engage active minds in disciplined imagination so as to further advance the frontier of our knowledge on innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship. Tenure and promotion should be by-products in the process of fulfilling that mission. The career concerns, however, distracted me. The advice I would give to my younger self is to devote more firmly.

INFORMS: Tell us something that not many people know about you.

LEE: I went through the 11th grade twice, the first time at the Taipei First Girls’ High School in Taiwan and the second time at the Sunny Hills High School in California. Then I went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, skipping the 12th grade in high school.

INFORMS: What is your spirit animal?

LEE: Giant gorilla.