The Impact of Technological Change on Knowledge Production and Exchange

Research shows that technological changes may dramatically reshape the distribution of competitive advantages within an industry across firms or individuals, sometimes taking the form of superstar effects. While such dynamics have been demonstrated for, for example, the entertainment industries, less is known about them in the context of industries and activities directed at producing and exchanging knowledge. To examine this issue, we hypothesize that changing to internet-based formats for knowledge production and exchange impacts opportunity costs on both the supply and demand side in such a way that 1) superstar effects and 2) the representation of women in these activities are strengthened. However, we 3) offer competing hypotheses with respect to the implications for knowledge proximity in knowledge production and exchange. Empirically, we focus on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the conduct of research seminars in strategic management at the world's leading business schools. A consequence of the pandemic was that most seminar activity worldwide moved online. Analyzing hand-collected seminar data (covering the years 2016 to 2021, 73 business schools, 3,694 unique seminar presenters, and 5,346 seminars) merged with data on presenters and the schools with which they are affiliated, we find that technological change induced by the pandemic strengthened superstar effects in seminar activity , increased the representation of female presenters, and affected topic overlap differently in lower- versus higher-ranked school.