In this hybrid research seminar on Tuesday March 31, 2026 at 12:00 pm by Professor Michele Pezzoni— will present his research titled "Exploration in Research Teams: Building on the Shoulders of PhD Students", co-authored with Raffaele Miniaci (University of Brescia, Italy); Sotaro Shibayama (The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan).
Abstract:
Exploration is a critical input for creativity and innovation. This paper aims to investigate how the innovator and her team's exploration activities boost the innovator's performance. In our empirical context, the innovator is a French professor at the university, and her team consists of her PhD students. We study 14,978 research teams, led by an equivalent number of supervisors. Supervisors and students can explore by investigating research subjects that the supervisor has not previously investigated. Moreover, the direction of their exploration can be more or less aligned. We measure exploration by assessing the similarity of students' and supervisors' research documents using text analysis. Our regression analyses find that both supervisors' and students' exploration activities play a role in determining the supervisors' performance, as measured by publication quantity, impact, and novelty. We show that an optimal combination of exploration activities and alignment yields considerably higher supervisor performance compared to the average. Our results support the idea that PhD students' exploration activities are of paramount importance to their supervisors' performance, and that supervisors should pay close attention when assigning students' thesis subjects.
The zoom link to join the seminar online can be found here. This event is open to the public; all those interested in this topic are very welcome to attend. After the presentation there will be time for questions and discussion.
For any queries related to our UNU-MERIT Seminar Series, please contact Lizeth Melissa Molina Alvarez and Karthika Baby Sujatha by sending an email to seminars@merit.unu.edu.