In my two primary streams of research, I seek to understand how multiple organizations across different sectors interact, coordinate, and/ or innovate to address critical societal challenges. I focus on education and healthcare settings, often in developing countries.

My first stream of research examines cross-sector partnerships and related contexts and contributes to a growing body of literature focused on collaboration and hybridity in organizational goals to tackle grand challenges – such as education, health inequalities, and poverty. Specifically, I am interested in how cross-sector partnerships and their member organizations create, introduce, and sustain positive social impact by collaborating across sectorial and professional boundaries. I engage multiple methods and settings to identify the strategies cross-sector partnerships and their member organizations use to balance differing objectives during their collaboration. In particular, I use econometric approaches in a panel data set on government-mandated virtual cross-sector healthcare partnerships in China to study contextual factors (e.g., regional and institutional differences) that enable collaboration and social impact. Moreover, I also investigate organizational factors (e.g., structure and governance) which may contribute to sustaining organizational commitment to collaboration. To further explore mechanisms in this large-scale empirical work, I draw from interviews and surveys conducted with key stakeholders, including private sector representatives, government officials, and community doctors. To consider these results' generalizability and boundary conditions, I plan to span other industries, including the education sector.

My second research stream focuses on place-based interactions between organizations and how these affect organization- and population-level outcomes. Specifically, I am interested in (process) innovation and its diffusion among organizations, including the drivers of adopting new technologies or practices at the organizational level. Here, I am particularly interested in the role of universities and how the supply of highly skilled human capital may act as a driver of practice diffusion. Using large-scale survey firm data on the adoption of practices merged with the population of universities in over 35 countries, I show that firms closer to universities tend to have better management practices but that cultural and comparative governance traits at the national level can impact this relationship.