The Interview: Moren Lévesque
Moren Lévesque is a Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems and the CPA Ontario Chair in International Entrepreneurship at the Schulich School of Business. Despite a seemingly varied array of research interests, ranging from AI, the pharmaceutical industry, stigmatized markets, angel investing and sustainability, her main area of research is entrepreneurial decision making. Moren spoke with us about her research interests, her time in Australia, and several upcoming journal articles.
Hi Moren! Please, tell us a bit about yourself!
Hello! Thanks for sitting down with me. Maybe I should start at the beginning, with my first academic job!
After completing a master’s in mathematics at Université Laval, I knew that pursuing a PhD in mathematics was not a good option because academic jobs were very limited. Yet, I wanted to teach.
I started out as a part-time lecturer at Laval’s Faculté des Sciences de l’Administration, and I taught undergraduate courses in probability theory, statistics, and calculus. After five years on contract, the Chair of the Département d’Opérations et Systèmes de Décision (which was their equivalent of Schulich’s Operations Management and Information Systems program) offered me a fellowship for doctoral studies in return for becoming a faculty member. I said yes, and because the Chair preference was to select an English-speaking university to expand where I could publish my research, I ended up going west to the University of British Columbia for five years. When I arrived at the University of British Columbia, the School of Business (not yet named Sauder) had then received the largest SSHRC grant at four million dollars to investigate entrepreneurship. As I pursued my PhD in Management Science, the topic of my dissertation became Entrepreneurial Decision Making: A Dynamic Programming Approach.
For my dissertation I used formal modeling to understand decisions as new business opportunities are recognized, and new business ventures are formed and grow. I continue doing this today, but I have expanded my research portfolio to include innovation (e.g., new product development) and technology management.
I then went south for 9 years, with a visiting position at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, followed by tenure-track positions at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York and then at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. As a proud Canadian, I was very excited to be lured to come back to Canada with tenure and a Canada Research Chair in Innovation and Technical Entrepreneurship at the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering.
These short ‘trips’ finally brough me to Schulich, where I have now been for almost 17 years. This long stay signals how happy and productive I have been in the Schulich environment and at York University more broadly.
Lately, I have been thinking that I need a great hobby to keep myself entertained once the time comes to retire. Modeling has come to mind, but a very different kind of modeling: clothing modeling’! One of my passions is fashion, so wouldn’t it be awesome to be an old lady model? The need is there with the aging population, and I have taken the first step by regularly exercising in my little home gym.
Well, one can always dream!
YOUR CURRENT WORK
Your focus on entrepreneurship seems to allow you a great deal of leeway in what you research and publish. In the past few years, you’ve written papers on AI, the pharmaceutical industry, stigmatized markets, angel investing and sustainability. What accounts for this wide range of interests?
This wide range of interests is born from choosing who to work with rather than the specific research topic (providing that it stays under the broad umbrella of decision making in technology, innovation management, and entrepreneurship!)
This does not only apply to colleagues, but also to whom I choose as doctoral students.
My PhD students must be sufficiently mature to decide what they want to work on rather than me giving them a research topic. I want them to be excited by the topic they pick (with the added bonus that if they start protesting about that topic, then they cannot blame their supervisor).
I also want doctoral students to become independent researchers, and the first step is to find a relevant research question to investigate. This is also how I was trained by my supervisor who said: “Go read Inc. Magazine and find an interesting question to study.” So I did!
So how did this approach work out for you?
I think it turned out OK, as the first chapter of my dissertation won the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) Ph.D. Student Best Paper Competition, publication in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and saw me receive the 1999 INFORMS Technology Management Section “Best Doctoral Dissertation” Award.
Have you found that this leads to new avenues for research collaborations?
Over my career I have been very fortunate to work with fantastic scholars, who have oftentimes approached me because of my mathematical modeling skills. I use these skills to build formal models that deliver testable propositions in the forms of relationships, while my co-authors have access to data to test the veracity and the sign (positive or negative) of these relationships. This approach has been working very well in the context of the research I’ve been carrying out on the biopharmaceutical industry, which offers extremely rich data and is of interest to new product development scholars who can appreciate formal modeling.
More recently, thanks to one of my doctoral students, Pierre Gautreau, I am learning about advanced empirical analysis for big data using new machine learning (ML) and AI-based tools that can offer more empirical sophistication and robustness. Pierre will be starting his academic career in Operations Management on July 1st, 2026, at the University of Manitoba and I am very proud of him!
What are you currently researching?
I currently am quite busy with research projects associated with data from the biopharmaceutical industry, since my most recent SSHRC grant has enabled me and my co-researchers to access industry-specific databases.
My doctoral student Pierre, along with two fantastic recurring co-researchers, Dr. Annapoornima Subramanian from the National University of Singapore and Dr. Vareska van de Vrande from Erasmus’ Rotterdam School of Management, are investigating the relationship between drug project discontinuations and inventor-level innovation outcomes (e.g., patent publication counts, patent citations). Although terminating underperforming drug projects can help free up resources, much less is known about how these decisions affect inventors whose projects are halted, or their subsequent opportunities to collaborate.
We address a selection challenge when studying project discontinuation: namely, weaker inventors may be associated with projects more likely to be terminated. We are constructing a matched inventor–project panel dataset that provides a credible counterfactual for inventors whose projects were terminated. We also intend to provide empirical evidence of whether project termination influences subsequent inventor-level innovation outcomes by altering future collaboration opportunities.
Are you doing additional research work in the pharmaceutical field?
Yes! Also with Drs. Subramanian and van de Vrande, we have a project on public-private and private-private collaborations in drug development in the context of Alzheimer’s disease.
With the contribution of Dr. Subramanian’s post-doctoral student Dr. Haizhen Jin and her knowledge of AI-based techniques, we examine the impact of these types of collaboration on drug projects’ advancement to the next development stage and the time it takes for this advancement. So far, our findings suggest divergent impacts of collaboration types on a project’s development progression and progression duration, compared to what has been proposed in the literature.
Me, Drs. Subramanian and van de Vrande, along with my Schulich colleagues Dr. Adam Diamant, and my doctoral student, Pierre, are also exploring biotech-pharma alliance breakups following drug launches. These alliances often involve asymmetrical dependencies, whereby a small biotech firm is relying on a large pharmaceutical partner, but not so much the other way around.
This asymmetry creates a serious vulnerability to biotech firms. Indeed, preliminary results suggest that terminations disproportionately occur after drug launches and that the risk of termination increases significantly during the three-year period following a launch. Moreover, a machine learning analysis suggests that the termination risk is predictable based on factors that can be observed at alliance formation.
One thing I should also mention is that you’re currently an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland at their Division of Innovation and Entrepreneurship – what are you doing there (besides fleeing the Canadian winter!)
I’ve done some work in Australia in the past. Previously, I presented research at Queensland University of Technology. From there, I was invited to present my research at the UQ Business School’s Division of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which eventually led to an Honorary Professorship. This position enables me to visit once a year, present my most recent research for feedback, and work with academic scholars of high caliber.
Visiting UQ also gives me access to more doctoral students. I currently serve as Associate Advisor for a dissertation exploring top management team nationality diversity and innovation value to untangle contextual enablers and constraints. This gives me the opportunity to co-author a manuscript with the student (Sara Khan) and Sara’s main supervisor Dr. Henri Burgers.
I also take part in the yearly Australasian Consortium for Entrepreneurship Research Excellence (ACERE) Conference, where I currently am a member of the Scientific Committee. This conference is a great way to showcase the Schulich School of Business, York University, and Canada, since I regularly participate as a panelist to discuss hot entrepreneurship topics.
In addition, Drs. Anna Jenkins and Lisette Pregelj, both on the faculty at UQ, conduct research on the biopharmaceutical industry, which, as you may have gathered, I am quite interested in. We are currently working on a project and a grant on the topic of drug development failures, with Drs. Subramanian and van de Vrande also in the team.
YOUR RESEARCH APPROACH
You mention that your theory of entrepreneurship is “built using mathematical decision-making models”. What benefits do you think such an approach offers?
Think about it this way: Scholars who conduct empirical analysis using regressions must use verbal arguments to posit the sign (positive or negative) of a relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable. Instead, I use the logic of mathematics, or a formal decision theoretical model, to suggest that sign.
So when would you use such an approach?
This type of approach is most useful when tradeoffs exist between nearly impossible to measure concepts (like risks, utilities, regrets), but these concepts are known to play a key role in decision making.
The logic of mathematics can also help researchers rationalize the sign of a relationship by exploring how the tradeoffs function. It offers a useful approach to help researchers guide managers to make more-informed decisions when aware of the impact of the tradeoffs.
AI AND IMPLICATIONS
In one of your articles you and your co-authors mention that “the management field is experiencing a misalignment between leading journals’ demand for new theory and the actual research delivered by scholars” and that there is an “illusion of theory development”. Can you expand on that?
Top entrepreneurship journals (e.g., those on the FT50 list) require theoretical development to build testable relationships/hypotheses, as well as new theoretical contributions.
On the one hand, the abundance of data and advanced AI methods that have become readily available to researchers, offer a different type of research by letting the data talk. The issue with research that “lets the data talk” is that the resulting insights (e.g., in the form of significant relationships between factors/inputs and outcomes/outputs) may not be rationalized by theory, even though this type of research can be highly relevant to practitioners (e.g., entrepreneurs, funders).
Another issue is that big data analyzed with advanced AI methods oftentimes result in prescriptive models. Although such research can build theory by detecting, for instance, which variables are most important to predict a certain outcome, it may not be based on ex ante theoretical developments.
Consequently, many reviewers are not embracing this approach, constantly requiring the use of theory to rationalize the relationships between variables, rather than letting the data talk. In other words, management scholars still live in a world where it takes theory to build theory.
A recent editorial you co-authored touches on this, with a call to establish new scholarly foundations “in the relatively uncharted world of AI in the domain of entrepreneurship”. Why do you believe this is important?
Advanced AI methods (like machine learning) learn from available data. If biases exist in the data, and we know they often do, then the results coming from using these methods will be biased. Said differently, the potential new theoretical insights that are delivered from using these methods could be incorrect.
With my colleague Dr. Martin Obschonka from the University of Amsterdam, we surveyed 172 entrepreneurship scholars and found that studies using advanced AI methods are trusted less than those using conventional statistical methods. Among the reasons, 75% of the respondents cited the lack of transparency owing to the black-box nature of advanced AI methods. Other reasons were data overfitting with 47.1% of the respondents, replicability concerns at 45.9%, and 39.0% mentioned the limited model interpretability. Only a few had no concerns (7.6%) [Note: This study will be published in an upcoming issue of Small Business Economics]
This initiative led Dr. Obschonka, five other colleagues, and myself, to work on a special issue in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, where I serve as Editor, that focuses on transformative AI for entrepreneurship theory and practice. An open access article about this forthcoming special issue is available here.
CURRENT AND FUTURE RESEARCH PAPERS
So, you seem to have quite a lot going on right now! Are there any other major projects that you’re working on?
What has been keeping me busy lately is multiple journal special issues where I serve as co-guest editor. Special issues are important because they open the door to new academic inquiries.
In addition to the one on transformative AI and entrepreneurship that I have highlighted above, I have three more that I’d like to mention.
The first one is out and with the Journal of Business Venturing. The focus of the issue is to further our understanding of entrepreneurship by unpacking the relationship between age and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship can unfold over an entire lifespan, but, at its core, is deeply shaped by age. The age of an entrepreneur can influence who becomes an entrepreneur, how well a venture performs, and whether an entrepreneur persists or moves on to other ventures. For young entrepreneurs, that trigger is often about making a social impact rather than making money. But it is in midlife when people have the means to create impacts for society. Regardless, the introductory article of the special issue synthesizes a decade of research related to age and entrepreneurship—and identifies ten research themes that illuminate the age-entrepreneurship relationship that outline how entrepreneurs do business—at any age.
The second special issue, forthcoming in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, speaks about mapping the landscape of hybrid entrepreneurship (becoming an entrepreneur while earning wages) and understanding its implications for entrepreneurship research.
This hybrid model is becoming more common (for instance, 59% of newly launched firms in the US used this model, 58% in Sweden and 62% in Germany)—however, scholars often don’t examine this form of entrepreneurship in the context of emerging and developing countries. In such countries, hybrid entrepreneurship has the potential to tackle inherent challenges that include inequality (e.g., among male versus female entrepreneurs), poverty, and the common financial constraints faced by entrepreneurs. Societal and economic changes like remote work, employee mobility in established firms, and a wealth of technologies enabling flexibility to start businesses while being employed, suggest that the prevalence of hybrid entrepreneurship is going to increase. Consequently, more opportunities may emerge to study this exciting phenomenon.
Also forthcoming in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, is a special issue on submissions that include research plans/preregistrations, registered reports and revisions. The objective of this special issue is to enhance transparency, credibility, rigor, and replicability in entrepreneurship research, akin to what we more commonly see in, for instance, psychology and medical research. To guide scholars on how to take advantage of these important publication formats, an open access call for papers for special issue was just released – you can read it here!
Thanks, Moren!
Moren Lévesque is Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems and the CPA Ontario Chair in International Entrepreneurship at the Schulich School of Business.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
