Tag: Faculty

Twenty-one new instructors and researchers—including seven postdocs—have joined Olin in accounting, data analytics, economics, finance, operations, organizational behavior and strategy.

Tenured/tenure-track faculty

Adrienne Davis, professor of organizational behavior (also William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law, WashU School of Law) JD: Yale Law School, 1991 Prior to WashU: professor, University of North Carolina School of Law

Fausto Gonzalez, assistant professor of marketing PhD: social-personality psychology, University of California, Berkeley, 2018 Prior to Olin: provost’s postdoctoral fellow, New York University

Teaching faculty/professors of practice

Damon Campbell, teaching professor of data analytics PhD: business administration, emphasis in management information systems, Washington State University, 2008 Prior to Olin: professor of management information systems, Millsaps College

Dedric Carter, part-time professor of practice, strategy and entrepreneurship (also WashU’s vice chancellor for innovation and chief commercialization officer and professor of engineering practice at WashU) PhD: information systems, Nova Southeastern University, 2005 Prior to WashU: senior advisor for strategic initiatives, Office of the Director at the US National Science Foundation

Sharon James, MBA ’89, professor of practice in strategy and entrepreneurship PhD: business administration, strategic management, University of Minnesota, 2007 Prior to Olin: tenured associate professor of management at Arkansas State University

Clive Muir, teaching professor of management communications PhD: rhetoric and professional communication, New Mexico State University, 1997 Prior to Olin: associate professor, Stephen F. Austin State University

Lecturers

Forough Enayaty Ahangar, lecturer, supply chain, operations and technology PhD: industrial engineering, University of Arkansas, 2017 Prior to Olin: postdoc, Cornell University

Rebecca Dohrman, senior lecturer, management and communications PhD: organizational communication, Purdue University, 2010 Prior to Olin: program director/associate professor of communication, Maryville University

Mahsa Mardikoraem, lecturer in supply chain, operations and technology PhD: management science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2021 Prior to Olin: instructor/teaching assistant, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Lorenzo Naranjo, senior lecturer in finance PhD: finance, New York University, 2009 Prior to Olin: associate professor, University of Miami

Gerald Onwujekwe, lecturer in data analytics PhD: information systems, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2021 Prior to Olin: instructor/teaching assistant, Virginia Commonwealth University

Esmat Sangari, lecturer in supply chain, operations and technology PhD: industrial engineering and management sciences, Northwestern University, 2021 Prior to Olin: graduate teaching assistant, Northwestern University

Sakya Sarkar, senior lecturer in finance PhD: finance, University of Southern California, 2015 Prior to Olin: visiting assistant professor, Indiana University-Bloomington

Visiting faculty

Alyssa Xingye Liang, visiting assistant professor of organizational behavior PhD: management, National University of Singapore, 2019 Prior to Olin: assistant professor of entrepreneurship, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Postdocs

Swaminathan Balasubramaniam, postdoc in finance PhD: finance, WashU Olin, 2021 Prior to Olin: WashU Olin teaching assistant

Bright Gershion Godigbe, postdoc in accounting PhD: accounting, City University of Hong Kong, 2021 Prior to Olin: course instructor/grader, City University of Hong Kong

Lina Han, postdoc in finance PhD: finance, WashU Olin, 2021 Prior to Olin: PhD research fellow, Luohan Academy, Ant Group

Miao He, postdoc in finance PhD: finance, Tulane University, 2021 Prior to Olin: instructor/teaching assistant, Tulane University

Lingfei Kong, postdoc in finance PhD: business administration, finance, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2021 Prior to Olin: instructor/teaching assistant, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Jerry Mathis, postdoc in accounting PhD: accounting, University of Michigan, 2021 Prior to Olin: instructor/teaching assistant, University of Michigan

Landon J. Ross, postdoc in finance PhD: finance, WashU Olin, 2021 Prior to Olin: analyst, Green Plains Renewable Energy

Many employers have already begun transitioning employees back to the office, while others plan to resume in-office work in the coming months. But after more than a year of working from home, is returning to business as usual even possible? Or desirable?

Employees have changed amid this pandemic. The more a company can match employee preferences and the optimal work conditions required for a given role, the better off they’ll be in terms of hiring and employee retention, according to Peter Boumgarden, an organizational behavior expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Working from home has a level of flexibility that is hard to match in a traditional environment,” said Boumgarden, the Koch Professor of Practice for Family Enterprise at Olin Business School. “Research by Nicholas Bloom and colleagues suggests that employees value this benefit, even seeing it as equivalent to the value they would get from a non-significant pay raise.”

And it’s not just flexibility that employees want.

“We know that autonomy — especially perceived autonomy — is a huge driver of employee satisfaction,” said Markus Baer, professor of organizational behavior at Olin Business School. “Just having the sense that you have control of your schedule and when to do certain tasks can boost motivation.”

Of course, there are benefits to working in the traditional office setting for individuals and teams. Interdependent work that requires coordination and input from multiple people is easier to accomplish in person. So are nonlinear tasks like brainstorming. Being co-located also helps employees feel connected to the team and provides networking opportunities that can help them advance their careers. This kind of rich social connection can be hard to mimic online, Boumgarden said.

Despite some of the benefits, some employers are seeking a return to more traditional working conditions.

“In my view, the return to office is driven by some mix of companies trying to recapture some of those lost elements, the desire to use expensive office real-estate set up for this strategy and, perhaps, because the old world still feels a bit more familiar,” he said. 

No one-size-fits-all approach

The question should not be whether to return to the office, continue working remotely or some hybrid option, but rather: What is the nature of the employee’s work? That’s what should drive return-to-work plans, Baer said.

For individual contributors, going into the physical office is less essential. In fact, many people have found over the past year and a half that they are more productive working at home without the typical office disruptions.

However, co-location becomes increasingly important as work becomes more interdependent and complex — especially when frequent communication is required, Baer said. Collaborative tasks such as ideating or coordinating projects are accomplished more efficiently in person.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean employees need to be in the office full time. For many teams, the ideal arrangement will change week to week based on current work needs, Baer said.

“There’s some research that shows that teams do really well when they have bursts of activity. I could envision teams coming together for a week or a block of intense activity to solve a problem and then disband when the problem is solved and it’s clear who is going to do what. Once those tasks are complete, the team can reconvene,” Baer said.

Hybrid challenges

From a productivity standpoint, a well-planned hybrid arrangement offers the best of both worlds: time in the office to plan and coordinate work, and uninterrupted time at home to complete tasks. Hybrid arrangements also enable employees to retain an office footprint while keeping some of the flexibility they’ve enjoyed over the past year and a half. For these reasons, Boumgarden believes hybrid work will be the future for many organizations. However, the challenges of hybrid work are significant, perhaps even more so than traditional in-person offices and fully remote work environments, he said.

“There’s some research that shows that teams do really well when they have bursts of activity. I could envision teams coming together for a week or a block of intense activity to solve a problem and then disband when the problem is solved.”

Markus Baer

“Very few of our offices are technologically or socially set up for a world where half of the workers are in the office and half are working from home,” Boumgarden said. “Managers needs to be thinking very hard about workflows required to drive efficiency and innovation in this new set-up. Overcoming these challenges will require investment of time and capital on the part of leaders.”

There are also employee management issues to overcome in a hybrid model. For example, if one person decides to work from home more frequently and another stays in the office, will they be seen equally by their superiors?

“I would argue that true clarity of expectations is critical. Workers should know both what the stated expectation is, but also what is the implicit norm,” Boumgarden said.

Lessons learned

For those who plan to return to a traditional office work arrangement, there are still lessons to be learned from the great work-from-home experiment. For starters, leaders need to revisit how frequently they schedule meetings, Baer said.

“When people are co-located, it’s easy to call a meeting to discuss something, but oftentimes these meetings are unproductive and nothing is really accomplished that couldn’t have been done in a simple email exchange,” Baer said.

The same communication tools that kept teams running while working remotely — such as Microsoft Teams, Skype or Slack — can still be used to inform employees or collect information without forcing them to sit through yet another meeting.  

Boumgarden hopes the experience of managing remotely will ultimately change how leaders do their jobs when they’re back in the office.

“For managers, I hope there are lessons learned about how one manages toward outcome versus micromanaging process alone,” he said. “Let’s start by acknowledging true contribution cannot be linked to minute and hours alone. For example, I might have an exceptionally productive hour that is equivalent to my typical four hours of output. The next day, I might have four hours of time that distill down to less than an hour of true ‘productivity.’ Or what about the breakthrough that occurs on a run or while lying awake at night? How should this be managed? Does it count as work time? These are the questions our next generation leaders should be asking.

“All this said, as soon as we realize that contribution does not neatly map onto time blocks, our way of assessing work should evolve,” Boumgarden continued. “I hope managers start to think about how they might creatively evaluate progress toward goals, while at the same time realizing that people work in different ways to reach this value.

“By not being able to micromanage over the last year-plus, I think many people had a realization that their actual management was much more superficial than truly additive of value,” he added.  

But perhaps the most important lesson we all learned over the past year and a half is the importance of remaining flexible.

“I think there is value in saying new models are still experiments. A company might roll out one approach to hybrid for some time and then adjust back as the data gives insight around what is and is not working,” Boumgarden said.

Here’s one way to look at how and when baseball pitchers throw at opposing batters after one of their own gets plunked: corporate conflict resolution.

That’s part of the research findings by three business scientists — two at WashU Olin and one at China’s Fudan University — who, true to the 21^st-century fabric of Major League Baseball, pored over 20 seasons of statistics to reach some intriguing data and conclusions with implications off the field and in the office. 

For one thing, these baseball retaliations mostly arise in the fifth and sixth innings. But let’s not get ahead of the game within the game.

At the heart of their study is how “negative reciprocity” leads to “destructive sequences of reprisal.” It translates into organizational behavior and, more pointedly, to workplace environment under the categories of conflict, cohesion and relationships — healthy or not.

As the co-authors write in the study, “Our findings yield insights about the origin and evolution of intergroup conflicts with implications for theories of conflict and for organizational practice.” The study, titled “Relational Aspects of Vicarious Retribution: Evidence from Professional Baseball,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

“Ethnography and experiments have given us a lot of insight about the biology and psychology of reciprocity, including how it often generates profitable trusting partnerships but can sometimes degenerate into prolonged, highly destructive conflicts,” said Bill Bottom, the Joyce and Howard Wood Distinguished Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Olin Business School.

Bottom, who is also Olin’s associate dean for undergraduate programs, was joined in the study by Tat Chan, professor of marketing at Olin, and Xing Zhang of Fudan University. 

“Major League Baseball provided us with a unique opportunity to study conflict escalation among highly paid professionals where the record-keeping is detailed and highly reliable,” Bottom added. “Because the game is now a global one, we could also examine the effects of diversity.”

“Major League Baseball provided us with a unique opportunity to study conflict escalation among highly paid professionals where the record-keeping is detailed and highly reliable.”

Bill Bottom

Certainly, businesses make punitive decisions within the workplace, via intergroup conflict, or they take malicious actions against other firms — sometimes at their own peril. The co-authors also make an allusion to similar acts of aggression in everyday life, such as the hate-mongering and name-calling that precipitated anti-Asian verbal and physical attacks on American soil in 2021. That’s an embodiment of the vicarious retribution seen on a baseball field when a teammate feels his side has been wronged and the pitcher throws at an opposing batter.  

The co-authors sought a simple, old-fashioned American backdrop: what they labeled the “empirical setting” of regular-season baseball. In fact, their paper cites and quotes Hall of Fame pitchers Pedro Martinez and the late St. Louis Cardinals great Bob Gibson, against whom opposing batters stood at the plate bearing consistent respect and, when tensions or situations came up, occasional fear.

“Vicarious retribution where third parties start getting involved is especially prone to destructive escalation, so this was a setting where we could study it over time under controlled settings where the rules are firmly established and enforced,” Bottom said. “Because the profession is now truly global, we can also examine the effects of culture and diversity on aggression, reciprocity and escalation.”

They thought by examining these occurrences and interrelationships, they could predict when a conflict might likely begin, which individuals are prime suspects for acts of retribution and then identify likely targets.

True, accidents happen in a modern baseball world of staffs of 12-plus pitchers and minor leaguers constantly called up to pitch in the majors. A younger pitcher misfires once amid the nearly 300 pitches per game and the ball glances off or strikes a batter inadvertently. In statistics-mad baseball, however, it’s possible to find clean data about intentionally struck batters. And they aren’t the first scientists to probe baseball thusly; they cited studies going back 30 years or more involving the social strata and bellicosity in baseball.

‘Punitive aggression’

Whether it’s by accident or on purpose, it’s recorded in the scorebook the same: hit by pitch (HBP). Bottom, Chan and Zhang studied two decades of “punitive aggression” in the majors, from 1991 to 2010. They broke down the pitcher and batter relationship: each to their own team, prior teammates or rivals, etc. Then they input the data into their computational model for retribution dynamics. For statistic-mad baseball types, that worked out to be 42,241 games, 2.5 million at-bats and 20,000 HBPs. Moreover, to test their hypotheses, they identified “113,461 unique pairs of a particular pitcher and a teammate who had previously been hit during a game as well as 479,955 unique pairs of a pitcher with an opposing batter.”

What they found will surprise nary an avid baseball fanatic. Once a second pitcher retaliates by plunking a batter from the team that first hit their teammate with a pitch, the incident is perceived as “legitimate justification” and the conflict subsides. Game-within-a-game over. Nobody else gets plunked.

Some other findings: 

• The initial HBP occurs most commonly in the fifth inning, around the game’s 42^nd at-bat.
• The retaliatory HBP comes in the sixth inning, around the 54^th at-bat.
• A pitcher is more likely to retaliate on behalf of a teammate if both he and his plunked teammate come from a country other than the U.S. (However, foreign-born pitchers — probably due to empathy for each other’s “outsider” status — are less likely to plunk a fellow foreign-born player.)
• A pitcher is more likely to target a fellow former collegian for reprisal. (Rivals from competing schools, the co-authors wondered? That would underscore the behavioral perception of “out-group” vs. “in-group.”)
• Winning teams and home teams are more likely to plunk in retaliation. Better paid pitchers are, too.
• Former teammates are less likely to be involved in a plunking.

That last finding is where a true everyday benefit scratches its place in the batter’s box of the business realm. Businesses often promote or cycle employees through their departments and organizations, building camaraderie and shared experiences. In other words, such moves are team-building and conflict-sturdy.

“Industries characterized by greater professional mobility may prove less susceptible to escalation; the broader scope of personal relationships may dampen motives for vicarious retribution,” the co-authors write.

Bottom concluded: “We found that the more diverse teams performed better and pitchers on those teams were more likely to engage in vicarious retribution on behalf of a teammate. Given prior work on cohesiveness of teams in industry, we expected that greater diversity might limit this kind of retribution but found that wasn’t true. The best teams appear to be adept at managing diversity and the willingness of veteran pitchers to take this kind of action on behalf of a teammate may be one aspect of that.”

So … play business.

Zhang’s work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants Nos. 72072035 and 71832002].

Photo: Benches empty, but no brawl erupts in a 2008 game between the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds in Busch Stadium. (Shutterstock)

When finding out life-changing news, whether good or bad, some people prefer to receive information as soon as possible. Others wish to receive and process bits of information over time or wait until the last minute to hear the news. Economists have tended to ignore consumers’ attitudes toward how information is disclosed.

A team including a Washington University in St. Louis economist lays the theoretical foundations that allow economists to take into account consumers’ preferences over how and when information is disclosed. The researchers, including two from Princeton University, created a model in which people react better when the news is revealed in the manner they are most comfortable.

The consumers that populate standard economic models only care about the likelihood of each outcome when making choices. “In practice, however, people exhibit strong preferences over the way in which information is revealed, even when the probabilities of each outcome remain fixed,” said Paulo Natenzon, assistant professor of economics at Olin Business School at Washington University.

Natenzon partnered with Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, both professors of economics at Princeton, in a new study in the journal Econometrica, titled “Random Evolving Lotteries and Intrinsic Preference for Information.”

“In our paper, we model agents’ preferences over random evolving lotteries (RELs), which describe, in probabilistic terms, how the beliefs of the agent change over time as the agent gathers more information about the likelihood of each outcome,” Natenzon said.

The researchers provide a new framework to analyze how people prefer to receive news in instances of possible risk, such as a health condition or a hoped-for promotion. “In organizations, leaving workers in the dark with too little feedback can be bad for morale. But overwhelming them with too much feedback too often can be just as bad,” Natenzon said. “Our work provides an analytic toolkit to precisely quantify the tradeoffs involved and find the sweet spot.”

The study addresses the difference between information-seeking and information-aversion behaviors. Some people are naturally bent to prefer surprise while others may be apprehensive when it comes to receiving news. Their model also can help explain the puzzling “ostrich effect,” which describes the tendency people have to become information seeking after learning good news, but information adverse when learning bad news.

“Many people bury their heads in the sand after receiving some bad news. The behavioral literature has shown that people’s preferences over information disclosure can be nuanced,” Natenzon said.

Natenzon believes that a study such as this one can help future research to try to map predictable patterns as a starting point in further exploration of potential attitudes toward receiving information.In the real world, people are more complex than what a model can predict on its own.

“This is a very active area of research, and having the right theoretical framework to guide our thinking about these issues can be the key to advance our understanding. The theoretical results we obtained in this study have allowed us to formulate new questions about information demand, and we are starting to test them experimentally in the lab, which is incredibly exciting.”

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This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant SES-1426252.

In the United States, no manufacturing source exists for more than 80% of the active ingredients in medicines the US Food and Drug Administration deems essential for public health, according to a new study from the Center for Analytics and Business Insights (CABI) at Olin Business School.

“This creates an incredible vulnerability to our public health care system, our health care security,” said Anthony Sardella, an adjunct professor at Olin and senior research advisor at CABI. He conducted the study using proprietary data from across the industry.

Essential medicines include antibiotics, antivirals, blood pressure pills, steroids and many others.

“We have a national security issue related to being able to maintain our public health,” Sardella said, because the US is so reliant on foreign production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

“The US Active Pharmaceutical Infrastructure: The Current State and Considerations to Increase US Healthcare Security” focuses on generic medications, which represent more than 80% of US prescriptions.

‘A fragile system’

APIs are the necessary components of medicines that provide patients with the drug therapy they need. The compounds are made into dosages of tablets, solutions and creams.

A June 2021 White House report on supply chain resiliency referenced an epidemic of national drug shortages occurring even before COVID and the pandemic, but “COVID really drew attention to the fragility of our pharmaceutical supply chain,” Sardella said.

The crisis highlighted US reliance on long, complex supply chains and drug shortages in the US. “We really have a fragile system.”

The first of its kind, the study relied on industrywide data from Clarivate, a data and benchmarking company in the healthcare industry that has developed a dataset—Cortellis Generics Intelligence—that provides insights across the sector.

“The data is staggering, as is the implication to our health security,” Sardella said.

A ‘race to the bottom’

His analysis shows the following:

• The majority of large-scale manufacturing sites of APIs are in India and China, while less than 5% of such sites are in the US. (In COVID times, both China and India have threatened to cut off or restrict shipments to the US.)
• Of 52 COVID-related medicines, 75% had no US source of API.
• Of the top 100 generic medicines consumed in the US, 83% had no US source of API.
• Of the 47 most-prescribed antivirals, 97% had no US source of API.
• Of the 111 most-prescribed antibiotics, 92% have no US source of API.

One cause for our weakness in API manufacturing is the “race to the bottom” on pricing against global players, Sardella said. Foreign manufacturers have structural advantages including greater government subsidies, lower costs and fewer regulatory burdens.

He said solutions to protect US healthcare security must address the risk by creating a critical mass of domestic manufacturing infrastructure to protect domestic interests; a level playing field for global competition; and sustainable domestic markets for American manufacturers.

“Tony’s outstanding research shows the impact of being both values-based and data-driven,” said Michael Wall, professor of practice in marketing and entrepreneurship and CABI’s co-director. “This principle is core to Olin and to CABI.”

The new study follows a previous one aimed at understanding the business, societal and governmental environment of the pharmaceutical supply chain. Sardella and Paolo De Bona, a consultant and formerly a staff scientist at WashU’s School of Medicine, conducted an extensive review of academic research, media reports and public policy statements to discern the causes of chronic pharmaceutical shortages in the United States and develop policy solutions to address them.

The work has gained the attention of policymakers in Washington, DC, and compelled the pair to join with the Brookings Institution in hosting a public forum on the subject. 

About the Center for Analytics and Business Insights: CABI serves as a  conduit between business, academia and the broader community, helping leaders better leverage analytics and technology to make a positive and principled difference in organizations, communities and society at large.

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies topped the 2021 RQ Top 50 list of the most innovative U.S. companies. The annual ranking identifies the smartest R&D spenders – those companies that both spend big (at least $100 million in R&D) and provide the greatest returns to shareholders from that investment.

Notably absent from the list were the three most attention-grabbing pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies of the year – Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

That’s because the RQ50 is not like other innovation rankings. Developed by Anne Marie Knott, the Robert and Barbara Frick Professor in Business at Washington University’s Olin Business School, RQ (research quotient) measures R&D productivity in theoretical models linking R&D investment to revenue growth and market value – precisely the outcomes executives and investors care about, Knott said.

“RQ essentially measures how smart companies are. Just as high IQ individuals solve more problems per minute, high RQ companies solve more technical problems per dollar,” Knott said.

“While most of the market still thinks R&D spending is the best gauge of companies’ innovativeness, it’s not. It’s quality not quantity of R&D spending that matters.”

The proof is in the numbers: The RQ50 portfolio historically outperforms the S&P 500, despite the fact that the two portfolios bear the same level of risk (beta), Knott said.

What does it take to make the RQ50?

The 2021 RQ50 represents a broad swath of the economy. The biggest representation comes from pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies, which comprise nine of the top 50, or 18%. Makers of semiconductors make up 14% of the list followed by computer programming at 10%. By contrast, 28% of the RQ50 are the only firms in their industry to make the cut.  

“So it’s not the case these firms are all riding the same wave of opportunity,” Knott said. “The RQ50 firms are standouts in their respective industries.”

Now in its eighth year, the RQ50 ranking is fairly stable: 66% of firms from the 2020 ranking appear again in 2021. According to Knott, that’s because firm capability changes slowly.

Of the 50 companies who made this year’s ranking, six have made the RQ Top 50 all eight years since CNBC published the initial RQ50 in 2014. These standouts include Hasbro, Lam Research, Netflix, NewMarket, Synaptics and Xilinx. 

New to the list

Seventeen companies are new to the RQ50 list. How did they make it?

• Alarm.com, FMC, Guidewire Software, Match Group, NortonLifeLock and Qualcomm were close last year, but ascended this year.
• Abiomed, Church & Dwight Co. and MaxLinear crossed the $100 million R&D threshold in FY2020.
• Cara Therapeutics – No. 2 on the list – was excluded last year because its R&D exceeded revenues.
• Prior to FY2020, Acacia Communications, Blueprint Medicines, Corcept Therapeutics, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lumentum Holdings, Square and Xperi Holdings hadn’t been publicly traded and conducting R&D for enough years to form their RQ.

Who dropped out?

In order for 17 firms to ascend, another 17 had to drop out. What happened to them?

• AMAG Pharmaceuticals and The Meet Group were acquired.
• Retrophin rebranded itself and now trades under a different name.
• Halozyme Therapeutics and Ironwood Pharmaceuticals dropped out because their R&D spending fell below the $100M threshold for inclusion.
• Arena Pharmaceuticals, Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Lexicon Pharmaceuticals and PTC Therapeutics no longer have revenues that exceed their R&D, a criterion for inclusion. 
• Allison Transmission, Dow, Intuitive Surgical, FireEye, Sirius XM, Take-Two Interactive, United Therapeutics and Veeva Systems failed to maintain RQs sufficient to keep them in the top 50.

COVID-19’s effect on innovation

While the COVID-19 pandemic shut down manufacturing lines and disrupted global supply chains, research and development – at least so far – appears to have continued its upward trend. During FY2020, which for some ended in June 2020 and for others not until May 2021, R&D spending in absolute dollars increased by 6%. During this same time period, revenues fell on average 10%, making the R&D investment even more significant.

“In most cases, firms committed to their FY2020 R&D spending before the pandemic. So it’s still too early to measure the pandemic’s full impact on firm R&D investment,” Knott said.

“However, I’m cautiously optimistic that firms will continue to prioritize R&D because if there’s anything the pandemic has taught us, it’s the importance of innovation.”