The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:54:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Inventor CEOs – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Inventor CEOs https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/14/inventor-ceos/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=inventor-ceos https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/14/inventor-ceos/#comments Wed, 14 Aug 2019 13:07:39 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=121156?d=20190814090739EDT Posted by Emdad Islam (Monash University) and Jason Zein (University of New South Wales), on Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Editor's Note:

Emdad Islam is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Banking and Finance at Monash University and Jason Zein is Associate Professor at UNSW Business School. This post is based on their recent article, forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics.

The academic literature has established that individual CEOs possess an idiosyncratic “style” which can be detected in their corporate decision making. One important, yet unexplored aspect of CEOs’ personal background that can influence their style, is the extent to which they possess hands-on innovation experience as inventors. In our recent article, we examine whether this dimension of a CEO’s personal background impacts upon a firm’s innovation activities.

A possible channel through which individuals acquire and refine specialized skills is through hands-on experience. In our study, we conjecture that  CEOs’ inventor experience may endow them with valuable innovation-related insights that translate into a superior ability to evaluate, select and execute innovation-intensive investment projects for the firms they lead.

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