Sen Chai
- PhD in Technology and Operations Management, Harvard Business School
- MS in Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
- BEng in Electrical Engineering w/ minor in Management, McGill University
Innovation, Strategy
Sen CHAI is an associate professor of Strategy and Organization (with tenure) at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management.
Sen's research examines the entire developmental course of creative innovations from idea conception to commercialization, with the goal of helping managers and policymakers better support innovation as well as avoid or manage failures in the hopes of increasing organizations' chances of creating breakthrough ideas. Her current projects include studying the role of anticipation in failure management, both in the context of innovation catastrophes and crowdfunding campaigns. She is also exploring gender dynamics in global teams and academic research teams.
Prior to McGill, Sen taught at ESSEC Business School in Paris and completed a post-doc at the NBER in Cambridge, MA. Before her doctoral studies, she worked in the San Francisco and Seattle offices of Deloitte Consulting LLP as a consultant helping clients optimize their business processes. She has also passed all three levels of the CFA curriculum.
Sen grew up in Paris, NYC and Montreal, and is also fluent in French and Mandarin. She enjoys traveling during her free time, and so far has visited over seventy countries.
- MGPO 460 - Managing Innovation
- MGPO 630 - Managing Strategy & Innovation
- Zhou, S., Chai, S. and Freeman, R. (2024). Gender Homophily: In-Group Citation Preferences and the Gender Disadvantage. Research Policy, 53(1).
- Chai, S., Doshi, A. and Silvestri, L. (2022). How Catastrophic Innovation Failure Affects Organizational and Industry Legitimacy: The 2014 Virgin Galactic Test Flight Crash. Organization Science, 33(3), pp. 1068-1093.
- Mell, J.N., Jang, S. and Chai, S. (2021). Bridging Temporal Divides: Temporal Brokerage in Global Teams and Its Impact on Individual Performance. Organization Science, 32(3), pp. 731-751.
- Chai, S. and Menon, A. (2019). Breakthrough Recognition: Bias Against Novelty and Competition for Attention. Research Policy, 48(3), pp. 733-747.
- Chai, S. and Freeman, R. (2019). Temporary Colocation and Collaborative Discovery: Who Confers at Conferences. Strategic Management Journal, 40(13), pp. 2138-2164.
- Chai, S. (2017). Near Misses in the Breakthrough Discovery Process. Organization Science, 28(3), pp. 411-428.
- Chai, S. and Shih, W. (2016). Bridging Science and Technology through Academic-Industry Partnerships. Research Policy, 45(1), pp. 148-158.
- Chai, S. and Shih, W. (2016). Why Big Data Isn’t Enough. MIT Sloan Management Review, 58(2), pp. 57-61.
