Selected Publications
Innovation in the boardroom: Rising to the challenge?
Australian Institute of Company Directors (2022)
Massimo Garbuio & Andrew Heath
Innovation is both disrupting and creating opportunities for Australian businesses, Not-for-Profits, and governments. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organisations to innovate in ways they have never previously considered. The challenge for Australian boards now is to harness these achievements to sustain innovation as business-as-usual practice within their organisations. The AICD has partnered again with the University of Sydney Business School to produce a second edition of its study into innovation and how boards bring it into focus.
Artificial Intelligence as a Growth Engine for Health Care Startups: Emerging Business Models
California Management Review (2019)
Massimo Garbuio & Nidthida Lin
The future of health care may change dramatically as entrepreneurs offer solutions that change how we prevent, diagnose, and cure health conditions, using artificial intelligence (AI). This article provides a timely and critical analysis of AI-driven health care startups and identifies emerging business model archetypes that entrepreneurs from around the world are using to bring AI solutions to the marketplace. It identifies areas of value creation for the application of AI in health care and proposes an approach to designing business models for AI health care startups.
Admit it, your investments are stuck in neutral
The McKinsey Quarterly (2019)
Massimo Garbuio, Tim Koller, Zane Williams
New research shows that companies that know how to shift critical resources where and when they’re needed share common traits. Rigor is the first one.
Demystifying the Genius of Entrepreneurship: How Design Cognition Can Help Create the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs
Academy of Management Learning and Education (2018)
Massimo Garbuio, Andy Dong, Nidthida Lin, Ted Tschang, and Dan Lovallo
Entrepreneurship education is a key beneficiary of design thinking’s recent momentum. Both designers and entrepreneurs create opportunities for innovation in products, services, processes, and business models. More specifically, both design thinking and entrepreneurship education encourage individuals to look at the world with fresh eyes, create hypotheses to explain their surroundings and desired futures, and adopt cognitive acts to reduce the psychological uncertainty associated with ambiguous situations. In this article, we illustrate how we train students to apply four well-established cognitive acts from the design-cognition research paradigm—framing, analogical reasoning, abductive reasoning, and mental simulation—to opportunity creation. Our pedagogical approach is based on scholarship in design cognition that emphasizes creating preferred situations from existing ones, rather than applying a defined set of tools from management scholarship. In doing so, we provide avenues for further development of entrepreneurship education, particularly the integration of design cognition.
Does scheduling matter? When unscheduled decision making results in more effective meetings
Journal of Strategy and Management (2016)
Boris Eisenbardt, Massimo Garbuio, Daniele Mascia and Federica Morandi
Managers spend a great deal of time in meetings making decisions critical to organisational success, yet the design aspects of meetings remain largely understudied. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the potential impact of one critical design aspect of meetings – namely, whether a decision to be taken (or the meeting in general) was scheduled or not – on the use of distributed information, information elaboration, conflict, speed of decision making, and, ultimately, decision-making effectiveness. This paper suggests that a scheduled meeting with a shared agenda of all decisions to be taken may induce decision makers to form opinions upfront at the meeting, with these opinions eventually serving as sources of conflict during group discussion. Because of the nature of the conflict generated, these meetings are more likely to run long and to not deliver the expected outcomes.
Evidence Doesn't Argue for Itself: The Value of Disinterested Dialogue in Strategic Decision-Making
Long Range Planning (2015)
Massimo Garbuio, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony
Previous studies of strategic decision-making have demonstrated a relationship between the strategic decision-making process and its effectiveness, namely whether the decision delivers the expected results. In this article, we demonstrate that there are two key dimensions of strategic decision-making: 1) the analysis performed, and particularly financial aspects of a decision; and 2) strategic conversations about the decision at hand, or the “disinterested dialogue” about the decision, as we refer to it. Whereas, it is well-accepted that a robust analysis is important for effective decisions, we argue that disinterested dialogue is also a necessary construct in explaining the effectiveness of strategic decisions. To test this hypothesis, we undertook a study of 634 strategic decisions made by executives across multiple industries and regions. The results confirmed that both a robust analysis and disinterested dialogue have a significant positive relationship with decision-making effectiveness. However, disinterested dialogue has a significantly greater impact on the effectiveness of strategic decisions than robustness of analysis. We discuss the impact of our results for theory and practice.
Delusion and Deception in Large Infrastructure Projects: Two Models for Explaining and Preventing Executive Disaster
California Management Review (2009)
Bent Flyvbjerg, Massimo Garbuio and Dan Lovallo
"Over budget, over time, over and over again" appears to be an appropriate slogan for large, complex infrastructure projects. This article explains why cost, benefits, and time forecasts for such projects are systematically over-optimistic in the planning phase. The underlying reasons for forecasting errors are grouped into three categories: delusions or honest mistakes; deceptions or strategic manipulation of information or processes; or bad luck. Delusion and deception have each been addressed in the management literature before, but here they are jointly considered for the first time. They are specifically applied to infrastructure problems in a manner that allows both academics and practitioners to understand and implement the suggested corrective procedures. The article provides a framework for analyzing the relative explanatory power of delusion and deception. It also suggests a simplified framework for analyzing the complex principal-agent relationships that are involved in the approval and construction of large infrastructure projects, which can be used to improve forecasts. Finally, the article illustrates reference class forecasting, an outside view de-biasing technique that has proven successful in overcoming both delusion and deception in private and public investment decisions.
For a complete list of publication, see here.