Shuping Wu

CV | Google Scholar
shuping.wu@insead.edu

Welcome! I’m Shuping, a PhD candidate in Management at INSEAD. I am on the 2026–2027 academic job market.

My research lies at the intersection of strategy and organization theory, and asks how macro-environmental forces shape innovation: hype, regulation, and funding. Individuals and organizations do not innovate in a vacuum. Technologies attract surges of collective attention, rules tighten, and funding systems evolve. I study how these forces redirect effort and shape the rate and direction of innovation, combining causal inference with machine learning and text analysis to measure concepts that were previously difficult to quantify at scale, such as technological hype, regulatory dynamics, and organizational innovation. My research has been published in Organization Science and Research Policy.

In my job market paper, I ask what happens when the language of technological hype reaches the experts who evaluate innovations. Exploiting AlphaGo’s 2016 victory as an exogenous shock to AI hype, I study patent examination at the USPTO and find that applications carrying hyped labels became 12 percentage points more likely to be rejected for inadequate disclosure when examined by AI-expert examiners after the shock, roughly a third of the base rate, with no effects on unrelated grounds and no response among non-expert examiners. Hyped labels are therefore not a costless legitimacy strategy: the label that attracts broad audiences also invites scrutiny from the experts who certify innovation.

Outside of research, you will usually find me on a climbing wall, working out a route the way I work out a research idea: read the problem, commit to the move, and keep reaching until it goes. I love talking with people about technological and scientific innovation, and about creativity in general, so please feel free to reach out.