About

Gerard J. Tellis (Gerry Tellis), PhD Michigan, is the Neely Chaired Professor of American Enterprise, Director of the Center for Global Innovation, and Director of the Institute for Outlier Research in Business (iORB), at the Marshall School of Business, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. He specializes in innovation, advertising, global market entry, new product growth, and pricing. He has published over 200 papers and 7 books on these topics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Machine Learning
• Computer Security
• Medicine
• World Wide Web
• Marketing
• Social psychology
• Business
• Economics
• Data science
• Cognitive science
• Knowledge management
• Econometrics
• Virology

Selected publications

• Smarter Idea Selection: Turning Idea Overload into Innovation Advantage

  NIM Marketing Intelligence Review · 2026-04-08

  articleOpen access

  rowdsourcing works -sometimes too well.With today's AI tools and digital platforms, companies can gather thousands of ideas in a matter of days.But the real bottleneck isn't generating ideas -it's evaluating them.When hundreds or thousands of submissions flood the funnel, even seasoned experts struggle to keep up.Fatigue sets in, attention wanes, and decisions become inconsistent.The question isn't how to get more ideas; it's how to identify the right ones quickly and reliably.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Makes a Product Cool? Consumer Perceptions of Product Coolness Across Three Cultures

  Journal of International Marketing · 2026-03-25

  articleSenior author

  Coolness can be a significant product success factor in today's global markets. Yet the field lacks a systematic understanding of consumers’ interpretations of product coolness across cultures and of the factors that drive possible cultural variations. The authors conduct two studies (with Anglophone consumers) to conceptualize product coolness, followed by two cross-cultural surveys (in cultures that use the English word “cool” in everyday language) that test an integrative framework for product coolness. The framework replicates across the sampled cultures, which include U.S., German, and Chinese consumers. Major findings are as follows: (1) Consumers universally interpret coolness in two largely distinct ways: A product is cool if it generates excitement or admiration (personal interpretation of coolness) or if its appeal is socially validated (social interpretation of coolness), with the former interpretation being generally more pronounced. (2) These interpretations universally correlate with distinct product attributes often associated with coolness and with desirable and undesirable coolness-related outcomes. (3) Robust cross-cultural variations emerge, linked to specific cultural values. Chinese consumers subscribe to the social interpretation, rely on exclusivity as a driver of coolness, and desire cool products to a larger extent than U.S. and German consumers. This finding can be primarily explained by Chinese consumers’ stronger orientation toward ascription (vs. achievement).

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Artificial Intelligence in the Ideation Process

  Journal of Product Innovation Management · 2025-06-06 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has important implications for business in general and innovation in particular. Ideation is the start of the innovation process. The authors review three fields of AI in ideation: identification and analysis of new opportunities, idea generation, and idea screening and idea selection. The results of the review are as follows. First, whereas in the past researchers highlighted the importance of industry characteristics and market stability, the authors now emphasize the importance of firm culture in driving innovation. AI will mediate this relationship. Second, across all stages, AI will improve efficiency, speed, and cost of ideation. Third, in opportunity identification, considerable progress has occurred in analyzing text and image; research on video and audio is relatively scarce. Fourth, in idea generation, AI increases the average creativity of ideas; however, the effect of AI on the generation of top ideas is conflicting. Fifth, AI assists very well in idea screening, but does not do a good job yet in idea selection. Sixth and most importantly, research remains in the early stages and will rapidly improve in the future. Thus, AI has the potential to radically transform ideation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cash or Non-Cash? Exploring Ideators’ Incentive Preferences in Crowdsourcing Contests

  Journal of Management Information Systems · 2024-04-02 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Even though research has repeatedly shown that non-cash incentives can be effective, cash incentives are the de facto standard in crowdsourcing contests. In this multi-study research, we quantify ideators' preferences for non-cash incentives and investigate how allowing ideators to self-select their preferred incentive—offering ideators a choice between cash and non-cash incentives—affects their creative performance. We further explore whether the market context of the organization hosting the contest—social (non-profit) or monetary (for-profit)—moderates incentive preferences and their effectiveness. We find that individuals exhibit heterogeneous incentive preferences and often prefer non-cash incentives, even in for-profit contexts. Offering ideators a choice of incentives can enhance creative performance. Market context moderates the effect of incentives, such that ideators who receive non-cash incentives in for-profit contexts tend to exert less effort. We show that heterogeneity of ideators' preferences (and the ability to satisfy diverse preferences with suitably diverse incentive options) is a critical boundary condition to realizing benefits from offering ideators a choice of incentives. We provide managers with guidance to design effective incentives by improving incentive-preference fit for ideators.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Product recall: a synthesis of multidisciplinary findings, and research directions

  Marketing Letters · 2024-03-23 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Ideators’ success in innovation tournaments: Participation, productivity, or pressure?

  International Journal of Research in Marketing · 2024-09-17 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Cash or Non-Cash? Unveiling Ideators' Incentive Preferences in Crowdsourcing Contests

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-04-02

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Even though research has repeatedly shown that non-cash incentives can be effective, cash incentives are the de facto standard in crowdsourcing contests. In this multi-study research, we quantify ideators' preferences for non-cash incentives and investigate how allowing ideators to self-select their preferred incentive -- offering ideators a choice between cash and non-cash incentives -- affects their creative performance. We further explore whether the market context of the organization hosting the contest -- social (non-profit) or monetary (for-profit) -- moderates incentive preferences and their effectiveness. We find that individuals exhibit heterogeneous incentive preferences and often prefer non-cash incentives, even in for-profit contexts. Offering ideators a choice of incentives can enhance creative performance. Market context moderates the effect of incentives, such that ideators who receive non-cash incentives in for-profit contexts tend to exert less effort. We show that heterogeneity of ideators' preferences (and the ability to satisfy diverse preferences with suitably diverse incentive options) is a critical boundary condition to realizing benefits from offering ideators a choice of incentives. We provide managers with guidance to design effective incentives by improving incentive-preference fit for ideators.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Is (and Isn’t) a Product Recall?

  Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2024-03-15 · 11 citations

  articleSenior author

  Safety in consumer goods is maintained by product safety laws and associated regulations. However, the legislation and regulations are specific to product categories and legal jurisdictions, thus impeding one's ability to understand what a recall is and isn’t, and how it differs from related phenomena (e.g., product-harm crisis). The authors aim to provide such an understanding. They reviewed 510 reports from academics, managers, governments, and regulators; conducted interviews with 25 practitioners; and used 10 recall data sets to identify seven fundaments of recall. They synthesize the fundaments to propose a definition and a decision tree of recall, which can help inform academics, journalists, managers, lawyers, and safety advocates regarding what term is appropriate in what context. The authors apply the fundaments to identify similarities and differences between a recall and a harm crisis, the term used frequently in marketing research in association with recall. The fundaments also enable the authors to make five recommendations each for lawmakers and regulators in an effort to guide the academic and practitioner discourse on product recall.

  PublisherDOI

• Can AI Help in Ideation? A Theory-Based Model for Idea Screening in Crowdsourcing Contests

  Marketing Science · 2023 · 73 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Authors test previously published theory-based models in a sample of idea-screening contests and find that efficient, automated screening is possible using easy-to-collect data.

  PublisherDOI

• Advertising Effectiveness

  World Scientific-Now Publishers series in business · 2023-06-19 · 14 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The following sections are included:IntroductionStream 1: Models of Advertising ElasticityStream 2: Models of Advertising Carryover and DynamicsStream 3: Models of Ad FrequencyStream 4: Models of Advertising ContentStream 5: Field Experiments of the Effects of AdvertisingStream 6: Effects of Digital AdvertisingSummaryAcknowledgmentsReferences

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eden Yin

  University of Cambridge

  33 shared

• Rajesh Chandy

  27 shared

• Seshadri Tirunillai

  24 shared

• Ashish Sood

  University of California, Riverside

  24 shared

• Rakesh Niraj

  23 shared

• Deepa Chandrasekaran

  The University of Texas at San Antonio

  17 shared

• Jaideep Prabhu

  Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education

  15 shared

• Philip Hans Franses

  Erasmus University Rotterdam

  15 shared

Education

• Post-Graduate Diploma in Business Management

  XLRI Jamshedpur School of Business and Human Resources

• Bachelor of Science in Chemistry

  University of Mumbai

• PHD in Business Administration, Business

  University of Michigan

Awards & honors

• Frank M. Bass
• William F. Odell (twice)
• Harold D. Maynard (twice)
• AMA-Richard D. Irwin
• Converse Awards