Tian Heong Chan

When do teams generate valuable inventions? The moderating role of invention integrality on the effects of expertise similarity, network cohesion, and gender diversity

Production and Operations Management

T. H. Chan, H. Liu, S. Keck, W. Tang

April 4, 2025

2023

Business Method Innovation in US Manufacturing and Trade

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management

T. H. Chan, A. Bharadwaj, D. Varadarajan

April 4, 2025

2022

Anchored Differentiation: The Role of Temporal Distance in the Comparison and Evaluation of New Product Designs

Organization Science

T. H. Chan, Y. G. Lee, H. J. Jung

April 4, 2025

2021

The Emergence of Novel Product Uses: An Investigation of Exaptations in IKEA Hacks

Management Science

T. H. Chan, S.-Y. Lim

April 4, 2025

2022

Revisiting the Role of Collaboration in Creating Breakthrough Inventions

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management

T. H. Chan, J. Mihm, M. Sosa

April 4, 2025

2021

Expert Perspective: Unpacking the Innovation Process

November 16, 2022

Innovation: Should it always be a team sport?

October 28, 2020

Conventional wisdom has it that innovation is very much a team sport. To create a breakthrough innovation that is vastly more successful than its predecessors, you need to prioritize teams over the individual.

Managing style and product design

July 30, 2018

Mobile phones look very different now than they did ten years ago. With access to all of the design patents available from the US Patent & Trademark Office (including ones from products in the telecommunications industry), Tian Heong Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, and coauthors Jürgen Mihm (INSEAD) and Manuel E.

Why Simultaneous Voting Makes for Good Decisions

Emory Business

February 12, 2025

How can organizations make robust decisions when time is short, and the stakes are high? It’s a conundrum not unfamiliar to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Together with Panos Markou of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Chan scrutinized 17 years’ worth of information, including detailed transcripts from more than 500 FDA advisory committee meetings, to understand the mechanisms and protocols used in FDA decision-making: whether committee members vote to approve products sequentially, with everyone in the room having a say one after another; or if voting happens simultaneously via the push of a button, say, or a show of hands. It turns out that when stakeholders vote simultaneously, they make better decisions. Drugs or products approved this way are far less likely to be issued post-market boxed warnings (warnings issued by FDA that call attention to potentially serious health risks associated with the product, that must be displayed on the prescription box itself), and more than two times less likely to be recalled. The main reason why these changes happen, however, has less to do with the voting mechanism itself than to positive changes in the discussion.

Unpacking the Innovation Process

Emory Business

July 25, 2022

Have you ever looked at a table or chair, stool, or other household item and thought, “I can use this another way”? If you have, you might be an innovative hacker, someone who operates from a product-first search process, which is the opposite of the “classic” problem-solving method. Tian Chan, assistant professor of information systems and operation management, worked with long-time friend and fellow researcher, Shi-Ying Lim, assistant professor of information systems and analytics at the National University of Singapore, to see if starting with a product generates more novelty (or uniqueness).

Most & Least Innovative States

WalletHub

March 23, 2022

How can state policymakers encourage and facilitate innovation? Innovation tends to have significantly positive geographical spillovers (meaning firms, institutions, or individuals at close locations benefit from frequent collaborations, sharing of ideas, etc.). So fostering/encouraging some kind of innovation hub (if none or few exist in the state) whereby such positive benefits of co-location can happen would be a good start. I also think that the presence of maker spaces or coding spaces where young kids can play and tinker with building products/software codes is useful to encourage innovation from a young age.

Successful products need to stand out … just not too much

Resoundingly Human

February 18, 2021

Joining me to share their research in this area is Yonghoon Lee with The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Tian Chan with Emory University. Their study, “Anchored Differentiation: The Role of Temporal Distance in the Comparison and Evaluation of New Product Designs,” selected for publication in the INFORMS journal Organization Science, looks at how consumers evaluate new product designs and how this can benefit product designers.

When Individuals Are More Innovative Than Teams

Harvard Business Review

December 31, 2019

"...However, our research has uncovered a factor that plays a key role in determining whether team outcomes will be superior to those of lone inventors: the structure of the invention — that is, the extent to which the invention can be broken down into separate components or 'modules.'"