Enrico Forti

Strategy and organization theory

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About

Enrico Forti is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and the inaugural Director of Research in the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University.

His research program lies at the intersection of strategy and organization theory with a specific interest in strategy evolution in entrepreneurial ventures and coordination and performance in contexts characterized by gig and remote work. His work has been published in leading academic journals, such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Research Policy.

Enrico has taught courses and performed research at leading institutions in the US, UK, EU, and China, including Columbia Business School, the UCL School of Management at University College London, the University of Bologna, and Peking University. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the area of strategy.

Enrico received a Ph.D. in Strategic Management from the University of Bologna and was a visiting doctoral student at London Business School. Before joining Seton Hall University, he was the Gabriel Hauge Assistant Professor of Strategy in the O’Malley School of Business at Manhattan College. Previously, he was a Lecturer in the Strategy & Entrepreneurship group at University College London, UCL School of Management and served as a Chazen Visiting Associate Research Scholar at Columbia Business School.

Publications

Working Papers

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CrossFit in the Crosshairs: A Community-Embedded Theory of Organizational Responsiveness to Social Issues — with: Piazza A. and Rietveld J.

Administrative Science Quarterly (2026) https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392251360671

How do community characteristics shape organizational responses to social issues? While existing research has focused primarily on firm-level attributes or issue characteristics, we argue that a community’s social structure systematically affects how external issues penetrate and resonate locally. We develop a theory of community permeability that links three structural features—network closure, segregation patterns, and issue connectedness—to both the local salience of social issues and subsequent firm responses. Our empirical analysis examines how thousands of locally owned CrossFit gyms responded to their CEO’s controversial statements following George Floyd’s death in 2020. Results show that issue salience is lower in communities characterized by stronger inward-focused ties and greater ethnic segregation, but higher in communities more directly connected to affected populations. Firms operating in communities where the issue is more salient are more likely to respond, particularly when their dependence on community support is heightened by disruptions unrelated to the issue. Our study reveals how community social structure creates systematic variation in both issue salience and organizational responses, advancing understanding of when and why firms act on social issues.

Competitive Familiarity: Learning to Coordinate by Competing — with: Ching K. and Rawley E.

Organization Science (2024) https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17068 [open access] Equally contributed. Authors listed in alphabetical order.

This paper develops and tests a theory of organizational learning, proposing that prior competitive interaction improves coordination amongst teammates. We test the theory using millions of experiments in the formation of eSports teams. The results show that exogenously assigned teams of former competitors are highly effective—the marginal returns to prior competitive interaction are even larger than the returns to prior collaborative interaction. The evidence suggests that teammates learn to coordinate by competing, a finding with implications for organizational design and the management of human capital.

Extemporaneous Coordination in Specialist Teams: The Familiarity Complementarity — with: Ching K. and Rawley E.

Organization Science (2021) https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.1376 [open access] Equally contributed. Authors listed in alphabetical order.

Team production is ubiquitous in the economy, but managing teams effectively remains a challenge for many organizations. This paper studies how familiarity amongst teammates influences the performance of specialist teams, relative to non-specialist teams. Applying theories of team production to contexts where team members coordinate interdependent activities extemporaneously, we develop predictions about factors that shift the marginal returns to specialization along two dimensions of familiarity: social familiarity and functional familiarity. We test our hypotheses in the context of DOTA2, a major e-sports game where, in some formats, players are exogenously assigned to five-person teams. After analysing nearly 6.5 million matches, we find that specialist teams are relatively more successful when members are more socially and functionally familiar with one another. The results suggest that the “plug and play” perspective on specialist teams is incomplete; rather, specialization and familiarity are complements in dynamic environments where team members coordinate extemporaneously.

Ghost in the Shell: Team Familiarity Improves Human-Machine Coordination. — with: Ching K. and Rawley E.

In preparation for submission.

How do human teammates coordinate with autonomous agents? We propose that familiarity among human teammates—arising from prior cooperative or competitive interactions—improves performance when teams of AI agents and humans coordinate to complete an interdependent task. We test the theory using data from a robotics competition where exogenously assigned teams compete in matches structured as an autonomous phase, with only agentic coordination among robots, followed by coordination among human teammates to complete the task. Results show that team familiarity improves agentic coordination among autonomous robots and that competitive familiarity is more effective than cooperative familiarity at doing so. Competitive familiarity further improves performance when the handover from autonomous robots to humans is characterized by ambiguous outcomes. The evidence suggests that familiarity among human teammates improves coordination and performance in teams where humans and autonomous robots coordinate to complete interdependent tasks. We discuss implications for research on team learning and agentic coordination.

Does VC Backing Affect Brand Strategy in New Technology Ventures? — with: Munari F. and Zhang C.

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (2020) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sej.1318

The resource-based view of the firm characterizes brands as important resources for firm growth and competitive advantage. Existing studies offer theory and evidence that venture capital (VC) backing enhances the growth of new technology ventures along different dimensions. It is not clear, however, whether and how VC backing affects the development of brand assets. In a study of VC-backed and non-VC-backed nanotechnology ventures in the United Kingdom, we find a positive association between VC backing and the development of brand assets. We also find that VC-backed technology ventures tend to create brand assets with a wider scope, which can be deployed across multiple different product-markets.

Style and Quality: Aesthetic Innovation Strategy under Weak Appropriability — with: ^Ching K., Katsampes S, Mammous K.

Research Policy (2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733323002317 [open access] ^ These authors contributed equally. Authors listed in alphabetical order.

Counterfeiting challenges firms to capture the value created by product innovation. We characterize style and quality as key dimensions of product innovation strategy in contexts where aesthetic attributes drive product success. We examine distinct aesthetic innovation strategies that firms may use to innovate their existing products — developing new style variants, using higher quality attributes, or both. Our empirical test exploits unique data on authentic plastic model kits matched to product-specific counterfeits. Controlling for several confounders, we find that new style variants that include higher quality attributes are 20% more likely to be copied relative to style variants that do not. We discuss implications for aesthetic innovation strategies in weak appropriability regimes.

Continuity, Change and New Product Performance: The Role of Stream Concentration — with: Sobrero M. and Vezzulli A.

Journal of Product Innovation Management (2020) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jpim.12521

Product development teams often face the challenge of designing radically new products that cater at the same time to the revealed tastes and expectations of existing customers. In new product development projects, this tension guides critical choices about continuity or change concerning product attributes and team composition. Research suggests these choices interact, but it is not clear whether they are complements or substitutes and if the level of change in one should match or not the level of change in the other. In this article, we examine the interaction between product attribute change, team change, and a new team-level factor, which we term stream concentration, as it captures differences among team members in terms of familiarity with the knowledge domain of the new product being developed. We assess the effects of stream concentration on the management of change in new product development projects using longitudinal data from the music industry. We analyze 2621 new product development projects between 1962 and 2008 involving 34,265 distinct team members. Results show that stream concentration is a critical factor in new product development projects that, together with product attributes and team composition, affects new product performance. We discuss implications for research and practice.

Naturals over Strivers: Perceived Naturalness Drives Platform-Mediated Resource Allocation — with: Lee J. and Tsay C.

Under review

On emergency crowdfunding platforms people provide support for medical needs based on emotionally charged campaigns. Unlike rationing in healthcare settings, which is managed by trained professionals using objective criteria, research has paid relatively limited attention to how nonconscious biases may affect platform-mediated, crowd-based emergency resource allocation. We find evidence of a “naturalness” bias in platform-mediated emergency resource allocation, whereby individuals framed as possessing innate advantages, or “naturals,” receive greater support than otherwise comparable individuals framed as effortful “strivers.” Although evaluators explicitly value striving and hard work as rationing criteria, in a large-scale field study of 268,679 emergency crowdfunding campaigns and in three experiments that manipulate narrative framing and allocation context, we find that candidates perceived to be more “naturally” advantaged are deemed more deserving of support than hard-working “strivers.” Our results are consistent across a wide range of situations spanning multiple years of inquiry and types of resources, including medications, hospital equipment, and financial support. By highlighting a social-psychological bias that may affect platform-mediated resource allocation, we offer actionable implications for platform design to mitigate inequities under scarcity.

Local Exchange and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the Diffusion of Autonomous Flight in Agricultural Aviation Drones — with: Zhang H. and Sands D.

Under review

Why does the adoption of new technology vary across seemingly similar contexts? Even in the presence of well-documented benefits and widespread access, diffusion often remains uneven. We propose that adoption is shaped by the micro-geographic embeddedness of exchange relationships. Specifically, we theorize that local exchange—commercial transactions between technology providers and buyers embedded in the same local community—facilitates adoption. We test this idea in the context of contemporary agricultural aviation, where drone operators choose between manual and autonomous flight. Using a novel dataset of more than 300,000 DJI drone flight paths over five years in rural China, we find that operators are significantly more likely to employ autonomous flight when servicing farms located within their own local community. These results highlight the role of local exchange in shaping diffusion dynamics and suggest that technology strategy should account for the spatial and social structure of market transactions. By characterizing the role of local exchange in enabling technology adoption, we contribute to research on technology strategy, economic geography, and innovation diffusion.