ProfessorPaola Criscuolo

Paola’s research explores how individuals influence innovation within organizations, focusing on how ideas are developed, selected, and supported. She examines how employees navigate rejection, engage in bootleg innovation, and use networks to build early backing for their ideas. Her work highlights the role of autonomy in sustaining creativity and investigates how R&D structures — particularly the balance between centralization and decentralization — shape the selection and success of novel ideas. She supervises PhD students in all these areas and she is interested in supervising new doctoral students.

Her research has been published in international academic journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Research Policy, and in practitioner journals such as California Management Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. Her paper "The Impact of Lay Summary Language Translation on Scientific Attention: Evidence from Cochrane Multi-Language Programme" with Rossella Salandra, Ammon Salter and Judith Deppe won the best paper DRUID 2025 conference award in Toronto. Another paper "Creative setback: How Ownership Misalignments Shape Employee Creative Engagement after Rejections" with Wei Wei and Barbara Larrañeta was awarded the best paper prize at the ACEDE conference in Pamplona in 2025. She received the same prize in 2024 for her paper "Inventors’ expected rewards for ownership transfer of their ideas and gender effects on creativity" with Wei Wei and Barbara Larrañeta .Her publication "Evaluating novelty: the role of panels in the selection of R&D projects" with Linus Dahlander, Thorsten Grohsjean and Ammon Salter won the 2016 Jürgen Hauschildt Award for the best research publication in innovation management, awarded by the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship section of the VHB- German Academic Association for Business Research and it won the 2016 EBS Business School Best Paper Award in Innovation Management. Her paper, “Does IP strategy has to cripple open innovation?”, with Oliver Alexy and Ammon Salter, won the 2010 EBS Business School Best Paper Award in Innovation Management and her paper, Managing unsolicited ideas for R&D” with Oliver Alexy and Ammon Salter, was shortlisted for the same award in 2011. She has also been shortlisted for best paper in both the TIM Division and the MDC division at the Academy of Management, for the best paper prize at the SMS conferences (2025).

Paola is an Associate Editor of Research Policy. She is currently a member of the Editorial Review Board of the Academy of Management Journal and of the Editorial Advisory Board of Industry and Innovation.

Paola teaches Innovation Management both in our Global MBA program and in our Master programs, and quantitative research methods in our MRes program. In 2020 she won a teaching excellence award for PhD supervision.

Before joining Imperial, Paola was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. She holds a PhD in the Economics of Technological Change from the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT), an MSc in Economics from the University of Warwick and a BA in Economics cum laude from the University of Siena.

When she was 17 years old she lived with a hosting family and studied in Spain with Intercultura (AFS), an organization which provides intercultural programs to help people develop their understanding and knowledge of other countries to ensure peace around the world.

Education / Qualifications
BA in Economics from the faculty of Scienze Economiche e Bancarie of the University of Siena in 1998. Dissertation, supervised by Prof. A. Vercelli and Prof. F. Coricelli, on "The diffusion of technology as a condition for the convergence process: a possible synthesis between neo-classical models and the technological gap approach"

MSc in International Economics and Finance at the Catholic University of Milan in August 1999

MSc in Economics at Warwick University in September 1999 sponsored by a fellowship from the Einaudi Foundation. Dissertation, supervised by Prof. Stephen Broadberry, on "An endogenous growth accounting analysis of the Asian miracle"

D. Phil. in Economics of Technological Change from MERIT in December 2004 partly funded by a Marco Fanno fellowship from Mediocredito Centrale and a Marie Curie fellowship from the European Commission. Thesis, supervised by Prof. Bart Verspagen and Prof. Rajneesh Narula on "R&D Internationalisation and Knowledge Transfer. Impact on MNEs and their Home Countries"