About

Mary Benner is a Professor in the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship Department and the Associate Dean of the Carlson Undergraduate Program at the Carlson School of Management. She holds a PhD in management from Columbia University, an MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and a BS in economics from the University of Minnesota. She joined the Carlson School in 2010. Her research explores how firms innovate and adapt to technological changes, focusing on the intersection of organization theory and strategic management. She has studied the effects of systematic process management practices such as ISO 9000 and Six Sigma on firms' innovation and responses to new technologies, and is currently examining the influence of financial markets and securities analysts on how established firms innovate and address technological opportunities and challenges. Her work has been published in leading academic journals and has received several awards, including the Academy of Management Review's Decade Award and Best Paper Award. She has served as a Co-Editor of the Strategic Management Journal since January 2023 and has held editorial roles at Strategy Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science. Prior to her academic career, she held managerial positions at Honeywell and was a consultant and consulting manager with Data Resources, Inc.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Computer Science
• Marketing
• Economics
• Industrial organization
• Advertising
• Telecommunications
• Statistics
• Finance
• Mathematics
• Accounting

Selected publications

• Shifting gears: Role of CEO turnover on shifts between exploration and exploitation

  Journal of Business Research · 2025-02-27 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Temporal ambidexterity (i.e., oscillating between exploration and exploitation over time) has been linked to profitability and growth of firms. However, the underlying mechanisms driving these shifts between exploration and exploitation remain poorly understood. This paper aims to investigate how CEO turnover and pre-turnover firm performance provide an opportunity for firms to shift between exploration and exploitation. Using panel data from 333 U.S. firms, the paper utilizes fixed-effects linear regressions and supplementary tests while addressing endogeneity concern in the empirical models. Our results show that firms have a higher magnitude of shifting between exploration and exploitation subsequent to a CEO’s turnover, and the degree and likelihood of the shift are stronger when CEO turnover happened at the time of weak firm performance. The paper highlights that CEO turnover does not unidirectionally shift the firm’s focus from exploitation to exploration but can result in shifts in either direction.

  PublisherDOI

• Short-Term Versus Long-Term Thinking in Corporations and Markets: A Half-Decade Update

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  This symposium addresses short-termism, marked by a preference for immediate gains over long-term value by managers and investors. Half a decade after the 2019 symposium on the same topic, extensive research has illuminated the multifaceted nature of short-termism. Despite recent advancements, many concerns and opportunities surrounding this phenomenon still remain unexplored. To address this, a panel of experts will share reflections and updates over the past five years of research, fostering nuanced dialogue on firm and market time horizons. Particularly relevant to scholars interested in the role of time in strategy, innovation, organizations, and society, this symposium provides a platform for interdisciplinary discussions on the temporal dimensions of organizational choices and outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• The Influence of Analysts on Innovation: An Evolutionary View of Evaluative Frames

  Academy of Management Review · 2023 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Industrial organization
  • Business

  Our process theory explains how securities analysts, as important intermediaries in public equity markets, both enable and constrain innovation in the firms they cover. We consider evolution in analyst “evaluative frames” – the categories, narratives, and schemas that underlie assessments of firms and explanations of stock valuations – to depict the shifts in analyst influence on different types of innovation. We describe mechanisms underlying the creation of new analyst frames sparked by nascent firms engaging in new to the world products, technologies, and business models, followed by processes of frame convergence and institutionalization. While new frames can enable non-incremental innovations in nascent firms, institutionalized frames constrain both new and established firms to incremental innovation in familiar products, technologies, and business models. Our theory suggests that analyst persistence in applying institutionalized frames can further dampen and even prevent non-incremental innovation in established firms, even when it is necessary for adaptation. Our theory addresses debates in prior literature about analyst influence on innovation and provides deeper insights into the influences of equity markets on firm innovation. Our work also suggests possible ways that firms pursuing innovation can seek to delay or prevent institutionalization in analyst frames to alleviate constraints from equity markets.

  PublisherDOI

• Irene M. Duhaime, Michael Hitt, and Marjorie A. Lyles, eds. Strategic Management: State of the Field and Its Future

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2023-02-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Equity Market Pressures and Strategy

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Publicly listed companies in the US have faced increasing pressure from equity markets over the last few decades. Pressures in various forms involving different types of investors influence the existing and future strategies of public firms. The panelists in the symposium aim to engage the audience in an in-depth and productive discussion of the challenges and opportunities in this research and creative ways to pursue new research frontiers in this area. The panelists have published research on the type of pressures that publicly listed firms face, how equity markets shape strategy, and how firms proactively influence shareholder and market perceptions. Each panelist will offer a unique perspective on how their work informs this body of research but also differs in some respects.

  PublisherDOI

• Innovation Processes Track: Evaluating Novel Technologies: Art or Science?

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022-07-06

  article

  The evaluation of novel technologies is central to ensuring that resources are allocated properly in addressing society’s problems. Despite its importance, challenges still exist that lead to promising innovations not getting properly evaluated and dying prematurely. Instead of a static, linear, box-ticking exercise, the evaluation process for novel innovations is mired with complexities. To address the current gaps in this growing research area, this presenter symposium will bring together top scholars to clarify current challenges in assessing novel innovations. The four presentations will holistically cover different aspects of novelty evaluation: evaluators’ advice-seeking with biased seekers and informants, evaluator’s thinking processes that rely on different information processing strategies, the way evaluations are affected by innovators’ social position, and how the process of entrepreneurial strategy formation unfolds under complex uncertain situations. This symposium will encourage future research in underexplored areas such as the role of the evaluators, the innovators, the context, and the idea itself in this process. The Role of Evaluators in Discounting Inventor’s Bias in Valuing Their Technological Solutions Presenter: Stefano Benigni; Imperial College Business School Presenter: Paola Criscuolo; Imperial College London Presenter: Markus Perkmann; Imperial College London When does Intuitive Thinking Work for Creative Forecasting? Presenter: Qi Zhang; Erasmus U. Rotterdam Presenter: Daan Alexander Stam; Erasmus U. Rotterdam Presenter: Dirk Deichmann; Erasmus U. Rotterdam Professional Logics and Collective Strategy Schemas During Industry Incubation Presenter: Bart Clarysse; ETH Zürich Presenter: Jana Thiel; ETH Zürich Novelty Evaluation & Narrative Strategies: The Outsider Challenge Presenter: Gino Cattani; New York U. Presenter: Denise Falchetti; George Washington U. Presenter: Simone Ferriani; U. of Bologna

  PublisherDOI

• The Strategic Drivers of Proactive Investor Attention

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Accounting

  Publicly-listed companies increasingly face pressures from the public equity market. Recently these market pressures have arisen from activist hedge funds who buy blocks of shares in a firm’s stock with the intent to intervene in the firm’s management. Despite the growing presence of activist investors, the nature of strategies that garner attention from these investors is not well known. This study uses the theoretical lens of a lemons problem in strategies, arising from information asymmetry and adverse selection issues in public equity markets, to argue that as companies’ strategies are incongruent with the expectations of market participants and therefore more difficult to understand, they are prone to public market dissent and likely to garner more attention from investors seeking involvement in management. Using a hand-collected proprietary database of SEC 13D filings and proxy statements, we find that companies’ increasing levels of strategic incongruence tend to be positively associated with attracting proactive investor attention.

  PublisherDOI

• Changing the channel: Digitization and the rise of “middle tail” strategies

  Strategic Management Journal · 2020 · 145 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Advertising

  Abstract Research Summary Prior research has studied whether digitization shifts demand away from mass‐appeal blockbusters toward a “long tail” of existing products. We extend this work by studying whether digitization influences the products created . Using unique data on movies, we examine whether the reduced costs of production and new digital distribution channels spur producers to create products aimed at smaller audiences. We employ a flexible, transparent, and largely graphical empirical approach to document changes unfolding with digitization. We find growth in both intended blockbuster and long tail products, but also, the rise of a “middle tail,” movies distributed via digital channels, with budgets suggesting commercial intent but well below the averages for theatrical distribution. The new middle tail is largely due to newcomers rather than major incumbents. Managerial Summary Digitization has reduced the costs to create movies, while also enabling new distribution channels that avoid the high costs of theatrical distribution. With lower costs, movies no longer need to be “blockbusters” at the box office to be financially successful. In this article, we study whether digitization has spurred an increase in lower‐budget movies that are not aimed for release in theaters. We find that digitization has unleashed a large number of very low budget movies that attract little commercial attention (i.e., the “long tail”). However, we also find an increase in a new category of movies with budgets between $100,000 and $10 million, aimed at smaller audiences via new digital distribution channels. We show growth in this “middle tail” following digitization.

  PublisherDOI

• Nurturing Online Communities: An Empirical Investigation1

  MIS Quarterly · 2019-05-30 · 104 citations

  article

  Online brand communities can be valuable to firms, but how do firms cultivate such communities? We find that engagement, that is, “likes” in response to firm posts, in the online brand community is associated with subsequent growth in the community. We theorize that when individuals engage with firms’ posts, the social media platform broadcasts such interactions to others, who are not necessarily part of the firm’s online brand community. Such social diffusion of information about the interaction and the related firm content provides individuals with new information about the firm, based on which they may decide to join the brand community of the firm. We find that firm posts that convey firm credibility through product and industry knowledge, convey organizational achievements through information about firm milestones, partnerships, or awards, seek opinions, and convey promotions or offers, are associated with engagement. Such posts have a significantly greater effect on engagement for early stage brand communities, that is, for those in their first year and a half, than for later stage brand communities.

  PublisherDOI

• Radical and Incremental Technical Change

  Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2018-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Inspired by Schumpeter, researchers studying the influences of technical change on industries and firms have sought to classify types of technical change according to how dramatic the shift is in the technology underlying products in an industry. Such technical changes have been commonly classified as either radical or incremental. Radical technical change is a discontinuous shift in the base of scientific or technical knowledge underlying the products in an industry or product class, whereas incremental technical change is continuous refinement along an existing technological trajectory.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Francisco Veloso

  11 shared

• Robert A. Lowe

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  9 shared

• Filipe Santos

  Universidade Católica Portuguesa

  9 shared

• Will Mitchell

  9 shared

• Tim Simcoe

  Carnegie Mellon University

  9 shared

• Peter Thompson

  9 shared

• Steven Klepper

  Carnegie Mellon University

  9 shared

• Claudio Wolter

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., management

  Carlson School of Management

Awards & honors

• Academy of Management Review Decade Award (2013)
• Best Paper Award in the Technology and Innovation Management…
• Stan Hardy Award for an outstanding paper published in the f…
• Excellence in Teaching Award, The Wharton School (2004)
• Academy of Management Review Best Paper Award (2003)