Previous fellows

Assistant Professor, ESMT

Linus Dahlander joined ESMT European School of Management and Technology in January 2011 as an assistant professor. From 2006 to 2008, Linus was an assistant professor and an Advanced Institute of Management Research Fellow with the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at Imperial College Business School in the UK. From 2008 to 2010, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he worked on the Mimir project that explores how networks shape ideas led by professors Dan McFarland, Woody Powell, Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning. Linus received his PhD in Technology Management and Economics from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden in 2006.

His research investigates how new ideas and innovations are developed in networks and communities. Linus is particularly interested in situations where problems are increasingly complex and a large number of individuals collaborate to advance a knowledge frontier. This research seeks to understand how these communities and networks unfold over time when individuals are distributed and autonomous – self-selecting tasks and collaboration partners.

Professor WSR
Department of Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management 

During my postdoc year I experienced without any doubt the most significant professional development in my career. I have improved my theoretical understanding, methodological insights and I learned hierarchical linear modeling. But most importantly, participating in the Stanford community has increased my ambitions and hopefully my skills to publish in high-ranking journals.

My mentor, Jesper B. Sorensen, challenged me to a degree I have not experienced before and completely changed my view of research. He changed me from a number cruncher to a researcher developing theories, and made me think about ideas independently of empirical data, whereas before I developed my ideas closely connected to the data I had available. Through this change I have been able to come up with more unique theoretical ideas with greater potential.

The program significantly increased my academic ambitions, improved my international network, changed my focus from data to theory, increased my knowledge and skills on more sophisticated statistical techniques, and in general made me a completely different researcher. 

CEO and Co-Founder of Symbioosi; Lecturer, Aalto University

Research: Industry evolution, organizational ecology, sales management, bibliometrics.
Focal industries: Biotechnology, healthcare, manufacturing, retailing, ICT. Besides actively contributing to academic research and education, I work as a consultant and advisor to several companies under the fields of strategy, strategic marketing, and sales management. I also teach frequently in different executive and management programs.

My time as a postdoc at Stanford included excellent coaching by Stanford scholars (both professors and PhD students) in how to formulate research questions, theoretical argumentation and research designs in such ways that are likely to yield papers publishable in top academic outlets. I discovered that the production of top-quality research outputs require rigorous planning, careful coordination, lots of hard work and iteration, and, above all, a long time.

Becoming acquainted with the Stanford culture and having discussions with people from various fields and with diverse backgrounds, I’ve also found novel ways to think of combining academic work with activities in, for example, the artistic and commercial space. 

Associate Professor, University of Oslo

In my research, I am intrigued by adaptive behavior of individual and organizational actors in learning from experience. In particular, I am interested in how actors' adaptive aspirations and the structure of connections among actors influence their learning outcomes. In particular, I am interested in how actors' adaptive aspirations and the structure of connections among actors influence their learning outcomes.  

Success is contagious, and its replication represents a fundamental challenge in everyday life of agents (individuals and organizations alike). My research focuses on how agents learn by imitating others who are successful, and what consequences for the system as a whole arise when individual agents pursue rational imitation strategies. I build on ideas of learning from a variety of disciplines such as behavioral decision making, social learning, and computer science to inform organization theory. My work contributes to three main sets of literatures: 1) organizational learning, 2) diffusion, and 2) social networks.

At Stanford, I worked with Professor Francisco Ramirez. We analyzed how the knowledge base of higher education discourse has been shifting towards more rationalized accounts. In addition, I am involved in the project on cross-national study of curricula and changes associated with globalization and multiculturalism.