Alice, Arusyak Zakaryan
Alice Arusyak ZAKARYAN is an Assistant Professor in Strategy and Innovation at Grenoble Ecole de Management since 2019. Her research interests cover organization studies, innovation and science & technology studies. Empirically, she investigates primarily biopharmaceutical and medical device industries as well as life science academic publications and scientists.
The first stream of her research examines the conditions that enhance or hinder an organization’s ability to learn from their experience (i.e. failure, success, or near-failure). The second line of her research is focused on innovation selection and termination decisions as well as the determinants of exploratory search and knowledge creation in organizations. In her more recent work, she is interested in the gender gap in science and innovation and attempts to understand how scientists’ and inventors’ gender influence scientific knowledge creation and innovation & technology development. Her research been published in journals such as Industrial and Corporate Change, Industry and Innovation, Technovation, Technological Forecasing and Social Change.
Alice ZAKARYAN holds Master degree in Management Sciences from SKEMA Business School and earned her PhD in Management Sciences from the University of Côte d’Azur and SKEMA Business School in 2019. Her PhD thesis was shortlisted for Grigor McClelland Doctoral Dissertation Award 2020.
- Innovation
- Technology Management
- Strategic Management
Cours enseignés à Grenoble Ecole de Management :
- Stratégie et Entrepreneuriat - Depuis 2020
- Stratégie et Business Model - Depuis 2020
- Strategic Management - Master - Depuis 2019
- Strategic Management - Depuis 2020
- Innovation - Master - Depuis 2020
- Zakaryan A., 2025.Exploration and the termination of inventions: the role of the structure of the firm’s knowledge base and its failure experienceIndustry and Innovation, 32, 2: 197-228
- Zakaryan A. A., Mei M.-Q., Jacob J., 2025.Inventor Gender and Termination of Patented Inventions in Biopharmaceutical FirmsAcademy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, Academy of Management, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Zakaryan A., Tzabbar D., Cirillo B., 2023.Mind the time: failure response time, variations in the reasons for failures, and learning from failureIndustrial and Corporate Change, 32, 6: 1245–1266How does a firm’s response time to past failures affect its likelihood of experiencing future failures? Does this likelihood depend on the reasons for past failures? Using drug recalls during 2006–2016, we examine the effect of pharmaceutical firms’ response time to their past failures on their learning from failure. Longer response times reduce the likelihood of subsequent failure. Variations in the reasons for past failures increase the potential for subsequent failure. However, a longer response time helps overcome the challenges associated with this variation. By focusing on the temporal dimension of learning from failure, we provide unique theoretical insights into when and how organizations can learn from failure.
- Iurkov V., Koval M., Zakaryan A., 2023.The role of network community characteristics for firms’ rapid business scalingTechnological Forecasting and Social Change, 196, November: 122838Which factors lead to firms' massive rapid business scaling? The prior work has predominantly focused on factors inside the firm, assuming that the possession of internally controlled idiosyncratic resources and capabilities largely explains the phenomenon. We extend this work by arguing that the alliance network community in which a scaling firm is embedded represents a distinct valuable channel through which it can access and orchestrate resources needed for its rapid growth. Network communities are structural groups of firms that are densely connected internally and sparsely linked to firms in other groups. We focus on three key characteristics of network communities: size, density, and stability. We theorize that the access to and orchestration of diverse and complementary network community resources influence firm rapid scaling through the expansion, replication, and synchronization of resources and business practices. Using a sample of firms publicly traded on the North American stock exchanges and observed over 1990–2020, we find that these firms' business scaling positively relates to the size and density of their network communities, yet the relationship between firm scaling and network community stability is negative.
- Zakaryan A., 2023.Organizational knowledge networks, search and exploratory inventionTechnovation, 122, April 2023: 102680This paper examines the effect of decomposability in a firm’s knowledge network—the extent to which knowledge elements in a firm’s knowledge base are coupled with each other or isolated from each other in separate knowledge clusters—on external knowledge sourcing and exploratory invention. We contend that decomposability shapes the process of inventive search and knowledge recombination. We show that the extent of external knowledge sourcing decrease and then increases with an increasing level of decomposability in a firm’s knowledge network. Second, we reveal that the opposite—inverted U-shaped—relationship exists between decomposability and new knowledge creation; nearly decomposable networks enhance the creation of new knowledge elements in a firm’s inventions. To test our hypotheses we investigate the innovation activities of a sample of firms from the global photographic equipment and supplies industry between 1975 and 2008. We highlight the contributions of these findings for research on knowledge networks, knowledge search, and recombination and discuss their implications for practice.
- Zakaryan A., 2023.Quality Compliance Following Near-Failures: Evidence From FDA Investigations In Drug Manufacturing PlantsBritish Academy of Management Conference, British Academy of Management, Brighton, United KingdomNear-failures—situations where an accident or a failure is avoided by chance—are frequent organizational phenomena (e.g. airline incidents). Interpreting near-failures as signs of vulnerability fosters organization’s ability to learn from such experiences. Conversely, when near-failures are interpreted as signs of resilience (i.e. near-success), organizational learning is limited. We question in this study—what is the effect of prior near-failures in compliance on the likelihood of future near-failures? We argue that ceteris-paribus, prior near-failure experience will increase the likelihood of future near-failures as risky behaviors become normalized in the absence of salient adverse consequences. We further predict that a firm’s prior failure experience and industry near-failure experience will moderate this relationship. We employ data on inspections conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in pharmaceutical plants to test our hypotheses. The expected contributions of this study to research on organizational learning and change are discussed.
- Zakaryan A., 2021.Exploration, knowledge base structures and the maintenance of patented inventionsStrategic Management Society Annual Meeting, SMS Strategic Management Society, Canada
- Zakaryan A., Tzabbar D., Cirillo B., 2019.The role of time in learning from failuresAcademy of Management annual conference, Academy of Management Proceedings, Boston, United States of AmericaThis paper seeks to improve our understanding about organizational learning from failure by distinguishing between two learning outcomes from failure–learning to better deal with failures and learning to prevent failures–and examining the role of time in these learning processes. We conceptualize time as the number of days a firm spends on search, knowledge codification and problem solving during failure recovery. Building upon learning curve literature and “garbage can” model of organizational decision making, we explore the double-edged sword of experience in learning from failure: firm’s experience with prior failures helps speed up its recovery from focal failures, yet speeding up the recovery process may be counterproductive for preventing the re-occurrence of failures in the future. When the recovery duration from prior failures is short, learning is shallower which increases organization’s likelihood of experiencing failures in the future. We further explore the implications of specific attributes of failure experience–such as the heterogeneity failures reasons–for organization learning. We test our arguments in the context of cardiovascular drug recalls and we highlight their implications for organizational learning.
- Zakaryan A., Tzabbar D., Cirillo B., 2018.Can success arrive too soon? The effect of early success on future breakthrough generationAcademy of Management Specialized Conference, Academy of Management, Tel Aviv, Israel
- Zakaryan A., Cirillo B., 2017.Experiential Learning and Knowledge Network StructuresAcademy of Management annual conference, Academy of Management Proceedings, Atlanta, United States of America