Informs Annual Meeting Phoenix 2018

INFORMS Phoenix – 2018

TA84

Tuesday, 9:30AM - 10:20AM

n TA84 Hyatt, Russell Innovation/ Entrepreneurship Contributed Session Chair: Yi He, Tongji University, Shanghai, China 1 - The Evolving Use of Patents as a Key Marketing Strategy by High-tech Companies Fang Wan, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, United States, Avi Seidmann Advanced technological capabilities constitute a major recourse for firms trying to achieve and maintain competitive advantages. Patented innovations and efforts therefore may determine the firm’s strategic direction. We analyze the impact of novel intellectual properties, especially the role of patents, on business strategies, and value creation. Our large-scale empirical research provides managerial suggestions on allocating firms’ resources between technological innovations and traditional marketing. 2 - Methods for Optimizing Technological Maturity in NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research Program Jeremy Eckhause, RAND Corporation, 1200 S. Hayes St., Arlington, VA, 22202, United States, Andrea Belz, Richard Terrile, Aleksander Giga, Fernando Zapatero Projects funded in NASA’s two-stage Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program vary in their initial, intermediate and final Technology Readiness Level (TRL). From past performance data, we obtain realistic transition probability distributions, enabling us to optimize strategies and budget allocations under various objective functions, such as maximizing the number of projects attaining a desired TRL threshold or those with any TRL progression. We compare models to historic strategies, highlighting the importance of a real options portfolio approach to maximize program outcomes. 3 - Growing and Developing Capabilities Along the Value Chain to Sustain Innovations in Emerging Markets Anshuman Tripathy, Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, Bannerghatta Main Road, Bilekahalli, Bangalore, 560076, India, Shikha Safaya Developed markets are characterized by well defined value chains which consist of modular activities (with well defined interfaces) leading to the delivery of the value proposition to the customers. Thus innovations tend to be, in general, incremental and limited to an activity, adopting the existing interfaces to the value chain. Our study of product, process and social innovations in an emerging market shows that such value chains are nebulous and to ensure sustainability of their innovations, the firms need to integrate through the value chain for economic sustainability, often requiring them to invest in assets and capabilities that, though complementary, are unrelated to their innovation. 4 - The Influence of a Firm’s Supply Network on Its Innovation Capability Shubhobrata Palit, Student, Georgia Institute of Technology, 800 West Peachtree NW, Atlanta, GA, 30308, United States, Soumen Ghosh In this research, we explore the role of a firm’s supply network in driving its innovation capability. Using secondary data, we examine how the diversity and the intensity of the innovation expertise of suppliers as well as the technology overlap of a firm with its supply base impact a firm’s innovation capability. 5 - Exploring the Origins of Successful Ideas on a Open Innovation Setting Nilam Kaushik, University College London, London, United Kingdom We explore the factors affecting the successful evaluation of ideas on an open innovation platform, in particular, the role of an idea’s genealogical sources. We leverage text mining and information retrieval techniques. 6 - A Study on the Relationship Between Self-Sacrifice in Leadership and Employee Creativity and Its Impact in the Cross-level Regulation of Team Trust Yi He, Tongji University, Room 2001, No 58 Songyuan Road, Shanghai, 200360, China This research integrates the theory of social learning and existing research findings in order to find out how self-sacrificing leadership can influence the creativity of employees in an organization. The hypothesis was tested positively, (1) self-sacrificing leadership has significant positive predictive effects on the participation in creative processes and the general creativity of employees; (2) participation in creative processes plays an intermediary role in the relationship between self-sacrificing leadership and employee creativity; 3) cross-level team trust adjusts according to the inclusion in processes of participation and affects employee creativity.

n Plenary West Bldg 301AB Plenary: Adopting a Risk-Based Approach to Passenger Screening Plenary Session Chair: Ali E. Abbas, University of Southern California, 3650 McClintock Ave, OHE 310R, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, United States 1 - Adopting a Risk-Based Approach to Passenger Screening Kenneth Fletcher, Kestrel Hawk Consulting, Inc., Gathersburg, MD, United States In 2011, the Transportation Security Administration began piloting a risk-based approach to aviation passenger screening. This effort represented a fundamental change in the government’s thinking about aviation security. Today, more than 350 million travelers receive expedited screening, and the approach is widely accepted. Adaptations of the U.S. program are functioning in Canada, Germany, Israel, Netherlands and the U.K. However, during the development of this initiative TSA leaders faced several policy decisions relating to accepting risk, treating passengers differently, and how to segment passengers into risk categories. This talk provides an insiders’ perspective on TSA’s efforts to implement risk-based security from one of the initiatives leading architects. n TB01 North Bldg 121A Data-Driven and Robust Optimization II Sponsored: Optimization/Optimization Under Uncertainty Sponsored Session Chair: Phebe Vayanos, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, United States 1 - Efficient Algorithms for Robust Markov Decision Processes Clint Chin Pang Ho, Imperial College Business School, London, United Kingdom, Marek Petrik, Wolfram Wiesemann Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) seek for optimal policies in view of the worst transition kernel from within an ambiguity set that specifies the knowledge about the unknown true Markov process. Although robust MDPs have emerged as powerful modeling tools, robust MDPs have typically been considered to be intractable, except for special cases where the ambiguity sets are rectangular in both the states and the actions. In this talk, we develop tractable solution techniques for robust MDPs whose ambiguity sets are only required to be rectangular in the states. 2 - Robust Reformulations of Ambiguous Chance Constraints with Discrete Probability Distributions Ihsan Yanikoglu This paper proposes robust reformulations of ambiguous chance constraints when the underlying family of distributions is discrete and supported in a box or an ellipsoidal uncertainty set. Using the robust optimization paradigm, the deterministic counterparts of the (ambiguous) chance constraints are reformulated as mixed-integer programming problems which can be tackled by commercial solvers for moderately sized instances. The associated approach can be easily extended to joint chance constraints, nonlinear inequalities, and dependent data without introducing additional mathematical optimization complexity to that of the original robust reformulation. 3 - An Iterative Algorithm for Robust Optimization with Decision- dependent Uncertainty Sets Chrysanthos Gounaris, Carnegie Mellon University, Doherty Hall 3107, Dept of Chemical Engineering, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, United States, Nikolaos L. Lappas, Anirudh Subramanyam Uncertain parameters whose realization can be affected by the decision maker, also known as endogenous uncertain parameters, could be modeled within the framework of robust optimization using decision-dependent uncertainty sets. However, existing solution methods that rely on classical duality-based reformulations pose known limitations. We propose a primal branch-and-bound algorithm that generalizes the well-known cutting plane method of Mutapcic and Boyd to the case of decision-dependent uncertainty sets. A comprehensive computational study showcases the advantages of the proposed algorithm over that of existing methods across a variety of applications. Tuesday, 10:30AM - 12:00PM

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