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.

I study scientific and technological innovation. Working at the intersection of strategy and organization theory, I examine how the environment surrounding innovation—both formal institutions such as regulation and funding policy and informal social dynamics such as buzz—shapes what gets invented, evaluated, and commercialized in science and technology. My work has appeared in Organization Science and Research Policy.

My dissertation builds theory about buzz: the collective excitement surrounding a scientific discovery or a technology, which pervades innovation yet remains under-theorized. Buzz is known to help innovators mobilize support; I ask how it shapes the evaluations of the gatekeepers who decide which ideas merit that support. More broadly, I show that buzz does not simply help or hurt innovation; it redirects it, encouraging invention while slowing commercialization and widening gaps in who benefits.

Before my PhD, I gained experience in technology and consulting, including at Meituan and Boston Consulting Group. 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.