Prof. Svenja Sommer
Svenja Sommer is Associate Professor of Operations Management at HEC Paris and Academic Director of the Executive MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She explores how companies can manage innovation when uncertainty is high — especially in early-stage or complex product development.
Svenja Sommer investigates how organizations manage innovation-related projects under uncertainty, with a particular emphasis on early-stage decision-making and collaboration. Her work sheds light on how firms can navigate unforeseeable uncertainty, complexity, and competing priorities during product development. She uses a mix of experimental, empirical, and analytical methods to uncover actionable insights for leaders managing innovation projects.
She has studied how steering committees can effectively govern novel projects, offering insights into oversight mechanisms that work under uncertainty and complexity. In other work, she examines how firms can structure search and learning when faced with such challenging projects. Her studies on brainstorming and idea generation highlight how team diversity and problem framing can influence creative outcomes.
A recurring question in her work is how incentives and organizational design influence not just efficiency but also innovation success. In particular, she has looked at collaborative settings inside firms and across firm boundaries. Svenja has explored how supplier involvement can be structured, and how prototyping and cost constraints shape joint product development. A recent study explores whether innovation teams benefit more from specialists with deep expertise or generalists with broader skill sets — and shows that the right team composition depends on the type of collaboration the firm aims to foster.
Svenja holds a PhD from INSEAD and previously taught at Purdue University. At HEC Paris, as the Academic Director of the Executive MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, she engages with professionals building innovation-driven ventures.
Her work has been published in leading international journals such as Management Science, Organization Science, and Production and Operations Management. She also serves the academic community in editorial roles, including as a Senior Editor for the “New Product Development, R&D, and Project Management” department at POMS, and as Associate Editor at both Management Science (Entrepreneurship and Innovation) and Service Science.