Sheryl Winston Smith, PhD
As a scholar of entrepreneurship, Sheryl Winston Smith is a recognized teacher-scholar at the intersection of strategy, finance, and entrepreneurship.
Biography
Dr. Sheryl Winston Smith is Associate Dean of Entrepreneurship and an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at BI Norwegian Business School. Her research elucidates the nexus of strategic management, entrepreneurship and innovation. Currently, her focus is on the relationship between entrepreneurial strategy and financing in new firms and subsequent performance; the role of corporate venture in innovation and competitive strategy; and the significance of intellectual property and prior knowledge in firm performance.
She is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for research on new firm performance. She served on the Program Committee of the 2011 Industry Studies Conference and was Chair of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Track. She received the Kauffman Foundation Best Paper Prize at the Strategic Management Society Annual Meeting in Rome, 2010 and the Kauffman Foundation Promising Paper Award in 2011. Prior to coming to the Fox School of Business, she pursued postdoctoral work at the Sloan School of Management, MIT and at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. She also was awarded a Rotary Foundation Fellowship to study innovation in the Czech Republic. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her B.S. from Yale University.
Sheryl is on the Advisory Board of Mid-Atlantic Diamond Ventures, a year-round venture forum and entrepreneurship-advisory program. Prior to her PhD work, she served as a research analyst for the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment.
Research
Selected Work
Spanning Two Worlds? Corporate Accelerators and Corporate Venture Capital in Innovation Portfolios
Working Paper
April 2025 version
This paper tackles a crucial problem in the theory and practice of global innovation strategy: In the face of technological and business model disruptions, which often originate in innovative startups, how do companies respond with entrepreneurial ideas? Specifically, how do established companies deploy different relationships — namely corporate venture capital and corporate accelerators — to facilitate access to startup innovation and tap innovative and disruptive ideas? Using a sample of companies that operate both corporate accelerators and corporate venture capital arms, this study points to distinctive roles of these two types of external knowledge partnerships with startups. Specifically, the paper points to greater experimentation in corporate venture capital portfolios in terms of startup focus and industry distribution relative to corporate accelerators. A novel algorithmic approach based on natural language processing and machine learning is used to identify and characterize the extent to which ventures are focused on similar or disparate ideas in corporate venture capital portfolios relative to corporate accelerator cohorts. The paper raises questions for further study addressing the potential for complementarity and substitution amongst these two forms of corporate innovation in partnership with startups.
Do Innovative Users Generate More Useful Insights? An Analysis of Corporate Venture Capital Investments in the Medical Device Industry
Users are an important source of innovation. Scholars have suggested that established firms will gain valuable innovative insights by working with user innovators. However, no study compares the extent to which knowledge sourced from innovative users, as compared to other external sources of knowledge, triggers the creation of new technologies and commercial products within established firms. This leaves established firms with little guidance when it comes to choosing where to search for external knowledge that ignites innovation. Based on existing empirical work in the literature on user innovation, we build a theoretical framework that explains why user knowledge will provide established firms with more ‘useful’ innovative insights than will other sources of knowledge. We test this claim in the context of corporate venture capital investment in the medical device industry. We find that established firms incorporate more knowledge from user innovators than from other sources of external knowl- edge into their patents and highly innovative products. Accessing the knowledge contained in user-generated innovations enriches the product development outcomes of established firms. We trace the flow of knowledge from start-ups to established firms using both an established method based on backward patent citation data and a novel algorithmic method that compares the content of regulatory documents.