Essays on Entrepreneurship and Human Capital in Knowledge-Intensive Industries

Abstract

Managing human capital is one of the most critical activities for any organizations in knowledge-intensive industries. Increasingly, it requires detailed understandings on the interplay between individuals and environments as these individuals respond to various opportunities and challenges that arise outside the organizational boundary. My dissertation examines how individual innovators and knowledge workers from three different organizations respond to rapidly changing incentives, opportunities, and contexts. The first chapter focuses on user-innovators in an online community and how they respond to commercial opportunities by pursuing entrepreneurship. The second chapter studies knowledge workers in an IT company and investigates how distance from hometown affect their productivity and learning over time. The final chapter analyzes workers in a rental car company to understand how they allocate efforts in different tasks in response to increased career concerns from potential corporate restructuring.