Renee Rottner, a PhD Candidate at The Paul Merage School of Business, won the INFORMS dissertation proposal competition for Organization Science. She was one of eight doctoral students to present her dissertation proposal to a panel of eight judges (selected by a different panel of judges from 65 dissertation proposals).
The competition was intense with students from Wharton, MIT, Columbia, Cornell, and INSEAD competing. The overwhelming consensus was that Rottner's proposal and presentation was the best.
Rottner's dissertation proposal is titled: The Life of a Project: Accomplishing Legitimacy in Sustained Innovation. Here she examines a space telescope project at NASA over a 30 year period to understand how the innovation was created and sustained over time. Rottner has conducted numerous interviews and has extensive archival data (such as meeting minutes and scientific journals).
Last year Rottner and Professor Christine Beckman applied for and won a grant from the History Program at NASA to fund this research. Currently Rottner is in the process of writing a monograph for them as part of her dissertation work.
See
[Rottner-Informs.ppt] to view the dissertation proposal presentation.