# Goran Calic's research

My research examines how organizations make consequential decisions under uncertainty. I study how leaders build strategy, how ideas move from creativity to innovation, and how emerging technologies reshape what organizations can do.

## The question

Everything I work on comes back to one question: how do new ideas turn into strategic results when nobody can know in advance how things will turn out? Managers still commit capital, entrepreneurs still pitch ventures, and organizations still bet on new technologies, even when there is no track record to learn from. I want to understand what lets them act well anyway.

That question runs through three connected lines of work:

- **Entrepreneurship.** How new ventures win over the people who fund them. Funders reward some signals and punish others, and they read a venture as a whole package, not one attribute at a time.
- **Creativity and innovation.** Why novel ideas are so hard to judge, why organizations say they want creativity and then pass on it, and how individual creativity connects to firm-level innovation.
- **Technology strategy and AI.** What data and AI actually change about decisions. More data is not automatically better. What matters is whether it is diagnostic for the decision in front of you.

## The next five years

Over the next five years I want to push in two directions:

- **Humans and AI deciding together.** When can an organization trust AI with real decision authority? How should people evaluate ideas that a machine generates? How should a firm govern AI as a strategic choice instead of a tool purchase? These questions matter most where mistakes are costly.
- **Large technology transitions.** How organizations mobilize resources, innovate and time their bets when they have to deploy new technology faster and at a larger scale than anyone has managed before. Energy is one of the best laboratories for this.

The test I apply to all of it is simple: would a manager care about the answer?

## Methods

Across experiments, large-scale data, configurational analysis, and industry studies, I look for the principles that separate promising ideas from action, and adaptation from inertia.

## Current projects

Right now I'm working on a number of projects. One group uses the energy industry as an empirical context for strategic management questions. A really fun project uses the population of nuclear power plant construction projects to see how strategic commitments affect organizational performance. Another set of projects measures AI's capacity to make strategic decisions. Here we develop a benchmark and run a series of experiments looking at how variations in market rules affect strategic decisions. In the context of AI, we also look at how creative AI can be in strategic decision-making, and whether that is detrimental or good for general performance and for innovative performance.

## Findings by theme

Each line below gives one paper and its main finding. The full references are at https://gorancalic.com/llm/publications.md.

### Entrepreneurship and resource mobilization

- In 1,395 Kickstarter campaigns, backers read a venture as a whole package: we found four successful combinations of signals and two failing ones, and narratives raised money only when they were backed by signals of quality and community embeddedness. (*Strategic Management Journal*, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3654)
- In 2,858 Kickstarter projects, second-person wording, asking questions and talking directly to the camera improved crowdfunding performance, although talking to the camera weakened the effect of the other two on the amount raised. (*International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research*, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-08-2023-0805)
- In nearly 300,000 microloans on kiva.org, women took longer than men to fund the same loan because they chose bigger loans, asked for more time to repay and faced lenders who preferred men-owned businesses. (*Small Business Economics*, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-023-00851-6)
- In 76,847 Kickstarter projects, rhetoric of revenge, self-disclosure and intimidation hurt crowdfunding performance, ingratiation and persuasion had mixed positive effects, and betrayal rhetoric, surprisingly, helped. (*Journal of Business Ethics*, 2023; https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04984-0)
- On a microlending platform, environmentally oriented small businesses in bottom-of-the-pyramid markets asked for more capital and more time to repay it, and they were more likely to repay. (*Business Strategy and the Environment*, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.2476)
- In 13,622 Kickstarter technology campaigns, more images and videos improved fundraising but weakened the positive effect of a longer text description. (*Journal of Business Research*, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.05.008)
- In 48,628 reward-based crowdfunding campaigns, signals of autonomy, innovativeness, competitive aggressiveness and risk-taking had an inverted-U-shaped relationship with performance, so they helped up to a point and then hurt. (*Journal of Business Research*, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.04.060)
- Sustainability-oriented ventures are more likely to reach their crowdfunding targets, helped by values shared with the crowd, endorsements by independent third parties and project creativity. (*Rutgers Business Review*, 2017; https://rbr.business.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/documents/rbr-020110.pdf)
- A sustainability orientation increases the funding success of crowdfunding projects, and project creativity and third-party endorsements partially explain the effect. (*Journal of Management Studies*, 2016; https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12201)

### Creativity and innovation

- A meta-analysis of 67 randomized trials with 6,259 patients suggests that creative arts therapies may improve anxiety, depression and quality of life in cancer patients, although the certainty of the evidence is low to very low. (*Psycho-Oncology*, 2026; https://doi.org/10.1002/pon.70425)
- Creativity research (rooted in psychology) and innovation research (rooted in economics, management science and organization theory) developed separately, so we map four research domains and propose ways to connect them; the paper introduces the Research Policy special issue on the topic. (*Research Policy*, 2026; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2025.105391)
- Across 23 studies and 1,036 participants, walking produced a large increase in divergent thinking (d = 0.93), while the evidence showed no clear effect on convergent thinking. (*PLOS One*, 2026; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0347878)
- After a focus group of 11 surgeons and a two-round Delphi survey of 60 surgeons, we reached a consensus definition of creativity in surgery as the interaction between expertise, environment, process and motivation that enables novel and useful solutions to surgical problems. (*Creativity Research Journal*, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2025.2543734)
- A scoping review of 81 studies covering 18,221 physicians, nurses and midwives shows that research on creativity in medicine is sparse, sits mostly in nursing (75%) and uses 45 different measurement tools, often without defining creativity. (*PLOS One*, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317209)
- This is the protocol for an umbrella review of the systematic reviews and meta-analyses on which personal and environmental factors are associated with creativity. (*PLOS One*, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311851)
- This is the protocol for the focus group and Delphi study that produced a consensus definition of creativity in surgery. (*PLOS One*, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0314445)
- Among 82 surgeons and surgeon trainees at McMaster University, divergent thinking was not meaningfully different from the adult norm, and the ability to generate original ideas was below average. (*BMJ Open*, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-081367)
- A simulation of 100,000 trials of a creativity task suggests that low degrees of creativity, combined with the elaboration of conventional ideas, may lead to a greater number of creative ideas. (*Knowledge Management Research & Practice*, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1080/14778238.2020.1730718)
- We argue that attending to sustainability and commercial goals at the same time creates constraints that increase the generation and implementation of creative ideas, which makes those constraints a source of new products, services and business models. (*Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal*, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1108/SAMPJ-02-2019-0084)
- In 1,065 evaluations by 71 participants, distracted evaluators rated ideas as more novel, but not more useful, than focused evaluators did, and EEG and pupillometry confirmed that the distraction drew cognitive resources away from the evaluation. (*Scientific Reports*, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-59096-y)
- A computational simulation suggests that the relationship between paradoxical frames and creative output is non-monotonic, so paradoxical frames can reduce creative output in at least some cases. (*Journal of Knowledge Management*, 2019; https://doi.org/10.1108/JKM-03-2018-0223)
- A computational model shows that contradictory demands raise creative output when they have a balanced effect on a person's search for new information and tolerance for new ideas, and that they can lower it for people who are already highly creative. (*Frontiers in Psychology*, 2018; https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01489)

### Generative AI and data

- Across nine generative AI chatbots, the originality of ideas did not change with their order within a response or, with DeepSeek-V3 as the one exception, with repeated prompts for more ideas. (*AI & Society*, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02816-7)
- ChatGPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Gemini 2.0 all outperformed 46 human participants on a divergent thinking task and a convergent thinking task, which calls into question whether current creativity assessments suit generative AI. (*Scientific Reports*, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-21398-4)
- A survey of 297 North American managers suggests that firms use big data to improve corporate social performance, and that the improvement comes through organizational innovation. (*Journal of Business Research*, 2021; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.11.003)
- In a survey of 239 managers, data variety and velocity improved firm innovation performance, while data volume had no significant effect. (*Journal of Business Research*, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.09.062)
- In a survey of 280 managers, data velocity, variety and veracity improved the insight firms drew from their data, while data volume did not. (*Journal of Business Research*, 2019; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.07.006)
- In survey data from 130 firms, using big data improved the quality of decisions only through data quality and data diagnosticity, with no significant direct effect. (*Decision Support Systems*, 2019; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2019.03.008)

### Energy and nuclear power

- We present what is, to our knowledge, the first transparent workforce model for Canada's national nuclear program, and it shows that skilled trades in on-site construction drive peak-year hiring, so apprenticeships and mid-career bridging have to expand for a 2050 buildout. (*Progress in Nuclear Energy*, 2027; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnucene.2026.106570)
- Across more than 500 reactor-years, heat- and drought-related curtailments cost 0.6% of the affected reactors' generation, so nuclear power's water challenge is technical and manageable. (*Energy Policy*, 2026; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115412)

### Management education

- In a service-learning project with US military veterans with disabilities, non-US business students gained cultural intelligence, and we propose four features of a cultural setting that help: moderate cultural distance, a tight culture, low context and high moral desirability. (*Academy of Management Learning & Education*, 2013; https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2013.0149)